Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker Read Free Page B

padlocks, swap them around, and lock them again. At the time I thought it was an amusing practical joke, though looking back, I’m sure it probably threw some people into angry fits and put them to a good deal of trouble, plus the expense of a new lock after they had managed to get the old one removed. Only funny, I guess, when you’re a teenager.
    One day when I was about fourteen, I was out with my uncle Mitchell, who was a bright star of my life in those years. We swung by the Department of Motor Vehicles and found it packed with people. He left me to wait while he walked straight up to the counter—just like that, walking past everyone standing in line. The DMV clerk, a lady with a bored expression, looked up in surprise. He didn’t wait for her to finish what she was doing with the man at the window but just started talking. He hadn’t said more than a few words when the clerk nodded to him, signaled the other man to step aside, and took care of whatever it was Uncle Mitchell wanted. My uncle had some special talent with people.
    And I appeared to have it, too. It was my first conscious example of social engineering.
    How did people see me at Monroe High School? My teachers would have said that I was always doing unexpected things. When the other kids were fixing televisions in TV repair shop, I was following in Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s footsteps and building a blue box that would allow me to manipulate the phone network and even make free phone calls. I always brought my handheld ham radio to school and talked on it during lunch and recess.
    But one fellow student changed the course of my life. Steven Shalita was an arrogant guy who fancied himself as an undercover cop—his car was covered with radio antennas. He liked to show off the tricks he could do with the telephone, and he could do some amazing things. He demonstrated how he could have people call him without revealing his real phone number by using a phone company test circuit called a “loop-around”; he would call in on one of the loop’s phone numbers while the other person was calling the loop’s second phone number. The two callers would be magically connected. He could get the name and address assigned to any phone number, listed or not, by calling the phone company’s Customer Name and Address (CNA) Bureau. With a single call, he got my mom’s unlisted phone number. Wow! He could get the phonenumber and address of anyone, even a movie star with an unlisted number. It seemed like the folks at the phone company were just standing by to see what they could do to help him.
    I was fascinated, intrigued, and I instantly became his companion, eager to learn all those incredible tricks. But Steven was only interested in showing me what he could do, not in telling me
how
all of this worked, how he was able to use his social-engineering skills on the people he was talking to.
    Before long I had picked up just about everything he was willing to share with me about “phone phreaking” and was spending most of my free time exploring the telecommunications networks and learning on my own, figuring out things Steven didn’t even know about. And “phreakers” had a social network. I started getting to know others who shared similar interests and going to their get-togethers, even though some of the “phreaks” were, well, freaky—socially inept and uncool.
    I seemed cut out for the social-engineering part of phreaking. Could I convince a phone company technician to drive to a “CO” (a central office—the neighborhood switching center that routes calls to and from a telephone) in the middle of the night to connect a “critical” circuit because he thought I was from another CO, or maybe a lineman in the field? Easy. I already knew I had talents along these lines, but it was my high school associate Steven who taught me just how powerful that ability could be.
    The basic tactic is simple. Before you start social engineering for some