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

turning on my headlights. I stop and we sit there, watching the front door of the building.
    After about ten minutes, the burly guard comes out, looking around in every direction but knowing damned well we’re long gone. Of course, he’s wrong.
    I wait until he goes back inside, then drive away, turning on my headlights after rounding the first corner.
    That was too close. If he had called the cops, the charge would have been breaking and entering, or even worse, burglary. Steve and I would have been headed to Juvenile Hall.
    I wouldn’t be going back into a telephone company facility again anytime soon, but I was keen to find something else—something big—to challenge my ingenuity.

Original Sin
     
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    A fter I figured out how to obtain unpublished numbers, finding out information about people—friends, friends of friends, teachers, even strangers—held a fascination for me. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a great storehouse of information. Was there any way I could tap it?
    For openers, I simply called a DMV office from the pay phone in a restaurant and said something like, “This is Officer Campbell, LAPD, Van Nuys station. Our computers are down, and some officers in the field need a couple of pieces of information. Can you help me?”
    The lady at the DMV said, “Why aren’t you calling on the law enforcement line?”
    Oh, okay—there was a separate phone number for cops to call. How could I find out the number? Well, obviously the cops at the police station would have it, but… was I really going to call the police station to get information that would help me break the law? Oh, yeah.
    Placing a call to the nearest station house, I said I was from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, we needed to call the DMV, and the officer who had the number for the law enforcement desk was out. I needed the operator to give me the number. Which she did. Just like that.
    (As I was recounting this story recently, I thought I still remembered that DMV law enforcement phone number or could still get it. I pickedup the phone and dialed. The DMV has a Centrex phone system, so all the numbers have the same area code and prefix: 916-657. Only the extension number—the last four digits—varies by department. I just chose those last digits at random, knowing I’d get
somebody
at the DMV, and I’d have credibility because I was calling an internal number.
    The lady who answered said something I didn’t get.
    I said, “Is this the number for law enforcement?”
    She said, “No.”
    “I must have dialed wrong,” I said. “What’s the number for law enforcement?”
    She gave it to me! After all these years, they still haven’t learned.
    After phoning the DMV’s law enforcement line, I found there was a second level of protection. I needed a “Requester Code.” As in the past, I needed to come up with a cover story on the spur of the moment. Making my voice sound anxious, I told the clerk, “We’ve just had an urgent situation come up here, I’ll have to call you back.”
    Calling the Van Nuys LAPD station, I claimed to be from the DMV and said I was compiling a new database. “Is your Requester Code 36472?”
    “No, it’s 62883.”
    (That’s a trick I’ve discovered very often works. If you ask for a piece of sensitive information, people naturally grow immediately suspicious. If you pretend you already have the information and give them something that’s wrong, they’ll frequently correct you—rewarding you with the piece of information you were looking for.)
    With a few minutes’ worth of phone calls, I had set myself up for getting the driver’s license number and home address of anyone in the state of California, or running a license plate and getting the details such as the owner’s name and address, or running a person’s name and getting details about his or her car registration. At the time it was just a test of my skills;