Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (7 page)

No sweat. On the wall of the computer room was a single telephone with no dial: it was for incoming calls only. Just as I had in Mr. Christ’s computer lab in high school, I would pick up the handset and flick the switch hook, which had the same effect as dialing. Flashing nine times in quick succession, equivalent to dialing the number “9,” would get me a dial tone for an outside line. Then I would flash ten times, equivalent to dialing “0,” for an operator.

When the operator came on the line, I’d ask her to call me back at the phone number for the modem at the computer terminal I was using. The computer terminals in the lab at that time did not have internal modems. Instead, to make a modem connection, you had to place the telephone handset into an adjacent acoustic coupler, which sent signals from the modem into the telephone handset and out over the phone lines. When the operator called back on the modem telephone, I’d answer the call and ask her to dial a phone number for me.

I used this method to dial in to numerous businesses that used DEC PDP-11’s running RSTS/E. I was able to social-engineer their dial-ups
and system credentials using the DEC Field Support ruse. Since I didn’t have a computer of my own, I was like a drifter moving from one college campus to another to get the dose of computer access that I so desperately wanted. I felt such an adrenaline rush driving to a college campus to get online. I would drive, over the speed limit, for forty-five minutes even if it meant only fifteen minutes of computer time.

I guess it just never occurred to me that a student at one of these computer labs might overhear what I was doing and blow the whistle on me.

Not until the evening when I was sitting at a terminal in a lab at UCLA. I heard a clamor, looked up, and saw a swarm of campus cops rushing in and heading straight for me. I was trying hard to appear concerned but confident, a kid who didn’t know what the fuss was all about.

They pulled me up out of the chair and clamped on a pair of handcuffs, closing them much too tightly.

Yes, California now had a law that criminalized hacking. But I was still a juvenile, so I wasn’t facing prison time.

Yet I was panicked, scared to death. The duffel bag in my car was crammed with printouts revealing all the companies I had been breaking into. If they searched my car and found the treasure trove of printouts and understood what it was, I’d be facing a lot worse than any punishment they might hand out for using the school’s computers when I wasn’t a student.

One of the campus cops located my car after seizing my car keys and found the bag of hacking contraband.

From there, they hustled me to a police station on campus, which was like being under arrest, and told me I was being detained for “trespassing.” They called my mom to come get me.

In the end, UCLA didn’t find anybody who could make sense of my printouts. The university never filed any charges. No action at all beyond referring my case to the county Probation Department, which could have petitioned Juvenile Court to hear the case… but didn’t.

Perhaps I was untouchable. Perhaps I could keep on with what I was doing, facing a shake-up now and then but never really having to worry. Though it had scared the hell out of me, once again I had dodged a bullet.

O
ver Memorial Day Weekend, 1981, Lewis De Payne and I joined a bunch of phone phreakers who were gathering for a “party.” The quotation marks are because who besides a six-year-old having a birthday or a bunch of geeks would choose a Shakey’s pizza parlor as a place to gather and frolic?

Something like two dozen people showed up, each one almost as much of a nerd as the worst of the ham radio enthusiasts. But some of them had good technical know-how, which made me feel I wasn’t entirely wasting my time.

The conversation inevitably got around to one of my favorite targets, COSMOS, the Computer System for Mainframe Operations, the Pacific Telephone mission-critical system that could bestow so much power on any phreaker who could access it.

Lewis and I already had access to COSMOS, one of the first Pacific Telephone computers I had hacked into, but probably only a few of the others had gotten in at the time, and I wasn’t going to tell them how I had. As we started talking, I realized the building that housed COSMOS was nearby, only a few miles away. I figured if a few of us went over there and had a go at a little Dumpster-diving, we might find some useful information.

Lewis was always ready for just about anything. We invited only one
other guy, a fellow named Mark Ross, who was very familiar with phone systems and someone we thought we could trust.

En route, we swung by an all-night pharmacy and picked up gloves and flashlights, then on to the COSMOS building. The Dumpster-diving turned up a few interesting items but nothing of real value. After about an hour, discouraged, I suggested, “Why don’t we see if we can get inside?”

They both wanted me to go in, see if I could social-engineer the guard, and then send a touch-tone signal from my handheld ham radio. Nothing doing—we were going to be the Three Musketeers or nothing.

We walked in. The guard was a young guy, the kind who looked like he might enjoy a toke pretty often. I said, “Hey, how you doing? We’re out late, I work here, I wanted to show my friends where I work.”

“Sure,” he said. “Just sign in.” Didn’t even ask for ID. Smooth.

We had been calling departments, analyzing phone company operations for so long that we knew where the COSMOS employees worked: “Room 108” kept coming up in Pacific Telephone communications. We found our way to it.

COSMOS. The mother lode. The jackpot.

A folder on the wall held sheets of paper listing dial-up numbers for every wire center in Southern California. They looked exactly like those glossy brochures in a doctor’s office, where the sticker says “Take One!” I couldn’t believe our luck. This was a real treasure, one of the things I most coveted.

Each central office has one or more wire centers. The telephone exchanges in each central office are assigned to a particular wire center. Armed with the list of dial-up numbers for each wire center, and log-in credentials, I’d have the ability to control any phone line in Pacific Telephone’s Southern California service area.

It was an exciting find. But I needed passwords to other administrative accounts as well. I wandered through the offices around the COSMOS room, opening folders and looking into desk drawers. I opened one folder and found a sheet labeled “Passwords.”

Whoa!

Fantastic. I was grinning from ear to ear.

We should have left then.

But I spotted a set of COSMOS manuals that would be crammed with gotta-have information. The temptation was irresistible. These manuals could tell us everything we needed to know, from how to make inquiries with the cryptic commands used by phone company personnel to every aspect of how the system worked. Today you would be able to find all this with a Google search, but back then, it was stored only in these manuals.

I told the guys, “Let’s take the manuals to a copy shop, run off a copy for each of us, and then return the manuals before people start coming back to work in the morning.”

The guard didn’t even comment that we had come in empty-handed and were leaving with several manuals, including several stuffed into a briefcase that Lewis had spotted in one of the offices.

It was the most stupid decision of my early life.

We drove around looking for a copy shop but couldn’t find one. And of course the ordinary copy shops weren’t open at 2:00 a.m. And then we decided it was too risky anyway to go back into the building a second time to return the manuals, even after the shift change—my ever-reliable plausible-story-on-the-spot mechanism wasn’t coming up with a single believable explanation to offer.

So I took the manuals home with me. But I had a bad feeling about them. Into several Hefty trash bags they went, and Lewis took possession for me and hid them somewhere. I didn’t want to know.

Even though Lewis wasn’t hooked up with Susan Thunder anymore, he was still associating with her, and he still had that big mouth of his. Somehow incapable of keeping quiet even about things that could get him or his friends in deep trouble, he told her about the manuals.

She ratted us out to the phone company. On a hot summer evening several days later, as I pull out of the parking lot to drive home from my job, as a telephone receptionist at the Steven S. Wise Temple, I pass a Ford Crown Victoria with three men inside. (Why do law enforcement guys always drive the same model of car? Did nobody ever figure out that it makes them as obvious as if they had “UNDERCOVER COPS” painted on the side?)

I speed up to see if they’ll U-turn and follow.

Yes. Shit. But maybe it’s just a coincidence.

I pick up speed, rolling onto the ramp for the I-405 headed for San Fernando Valley.

The Crown Vic is catching up.

As I watch in my rearview mirror, an arm reaches out and places a set of cop-car flashers on the roof, and the lights start blinking. Oh shit! Why are they pulling me over? The thought of gunning it races through my mind. A high-speed chase? Insane.

No way am I going to try to run. I pull over.

The car pulls up behind me. The three guys leap out. They start running toward me.

They’re drawing their guns!!!

They’re shouting,
“Get out of the car!”

In an instant, I’m in handcuffs. Once again they’re closed painfully tight.

One of the guys shouts in my ear,
“You’re gonna stop fucking around with the phone company! We’re gonna teach you a lesson!”
I’m so scared I start crying.

Another car pulls up. The driver hops out and runs toward us. He’s shouting at the cops,
“Search his car for the bomb! He’s got a logic bomb!!”

Now I’m practically laughing through my tears. A logic bomb is a piece of software, but these guys don’t seem to know that. They think I’m carrying something that can blow everybody up!

They start grilling me. “Where are the manuals?”

I tell them, “I’m a juvenile, I want to call my lawyer.”

Instead they treated me like a terrorist, taking me to a police station in Pasadena, about a forty-five-minute drive away, and parading me to a holding cell. No bars, just a small room like a cement coffin, with a huge steel door that no sounds could penetrate. I tried to get my one phone call, but the cops refused. Apparently juveniles didn’t have any constitutional rights.

Finally a Probation Officer showed up to interview me. Although he had the power to release me to my parents, the cops convinced him that I was what today might be described as the Hannibal Lecter of computer hacking. I was transferred in handcuffs to Juvenile Hall in East Los Angeles overnight, and brought into court for an appearance the next day. My mom and dad were there, both trying to get me released.

The
Pasadena Star-News
ran a lengthy article about me. That was followed by an even bigger story in the Sunday
Los Angeles Times
. Of course, since I was a juvenile, they weren’t allowed to publish my name.

They did anyway, and it would have consequences for me later.

(As a side note to this story, I would later find out that the guy shouting about the logic bomb was Steve Cooley, the assistant district attorney assigned to my case; today, he is top dog,
the
district attorney for Los Angeles County. My aunt Chickie Leventhal, who has long run an operation called Chickie’s Bail Bonds, knows Cooley; some years ago, after my book
The Art of Deception
was published, she offered it as one of the prizes for a fund-raiser to benefit a children’s charity that Cooley attended. When she told him I was her nephew, he said he wanted a copy of the book. He asked if I’d sign it and write in it, “We’ve both come a very long way.” Indeed we have. I was glad to do it for him.)

The Juvenile Court judge who heard my case seemed puzzled: I was charged with being a hacker, but I hadn’t stolen and used any credit card numbers, nor had I sold any proprietary software or trade secrets. I had just hacked into computers and phone company systems for the sheer entertainment. The judge didn’t seem to understand why I would do such things without profiting from my actions. The idea that I was doing it for fun didn’t seem to make sense.

Since he wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing once I got into the computers and phone systems, he figured maybe he was missing something. Maybe I was taking money or making a profit in some high-tech way he didn’t comprehend. The whole thing probably made him suspicious.

The truth was, I broke into the phone system for the same reason another kid might break into an abandoned house down the block: just to check it out. The temptation to explore and find out what’s in there was too great. Sure, there might be danger, but taking a risk was part of the fun.

Because this was the first hacking case ever, there was more than a little confusion over exactly what the district attorney could charge me with. While some of the charges were legitimate, having to do with my breaking into and entering the phone company, others were not. The prosecutor claimed that in my hacking I had damaged computer systems at U.S. Leasing. I hadn’t, but it wouldn’t be the last time I was accused of this.