Cat and Mouse
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S
ince Lewis had cut way back on his hacking time to keep Bonnie happy, I
fell into hacking with a buddy of his. Terry Hardy was definitely not your
everyday sort of guy.
Tall and with a high forehead, he talked in a
monotone, like a robot. We nicknamed him “Klingon,” after the race of
aliens in
Star Trek
, because we thought he shared some of their physical
characteristics.
A variety of savant, he could carry on a conversation
looking you in the eye while at the same time typing eighty-five words a
minute on the computer. It was incredible to watch,
and distinctly
unnerving.
One day when Terry, Lewis, and I were with Dave Harrison at Dave’s
office, I said, “Hey, let’s see if we can get Darrell Santos’s voicemail
password.” This could be a way of proving myself to the people at Teltec. If
I could actually pull it off.
I called the frame that served the telephone numbers at the offices of
PacBell Security, and had the tech look up the cable-and-pair for a phone
number I gave him: the number for PacBell Security
Investigator Darrell
Santos.
My goal was to get an SAS connection put up on Santos’s line, but I
wanted it done in a special way. From my research into SAS, I had learned
about something called an “SAS shoe,” a physical connection that had the
advantage of letting you drop in on a line and stay on, listening to any calls
the subscriber made or received. And with this method, there was no
audible
click
on the line when the SAS connection was established.
What would the tech have thought if he’d known that the phone tap he
was setting up was on a line belonging to PacBell Security!?
My timing couldn’t have been better. As soon as I popped onto the line,
I heard a recorded female voice saying, “Please enter your password.” Terry
Hardy happened to be next to me at the time. Another of his unusual
abilities was that he had perfect pitch, or at least some variety of that rare
aptitude: he could listen to the touch tones of a phone number being keyed
in and tell you what number had just been called.
I shouted across the room
for Lewis and Dave to be quiet, then said,
“Terry,
listen, listen!
” He got closer to the speakerphone just in time to hear
the touch tones as Santos entered his voicemail password.
Terry just stood there, as if lost in thought. For maybe twenty seconds. I
didn’t dare interrupt.
Then: “I think it’s ‘1313,’ ” he said.
For the next two or three minutes, we all stood there frozen while Santos
—and the four of us—listened to his voicemail messages. After he hung up,
I called his voicemail access number and entered “1313” as his password.
It worked.
We were stoked! Dave, Lewis, Terry, and I all jumped around high-
fiving one another.
Terry and I went through the same process and eventually got Lilly
Creek’s voicemail password as well.
I began making it a daily routine to check both their voicemails, always
after hours, when I could be fairly certain they wouldn’t be trying to call in
at the same time themselves: getting a message that their voicemail box was
in use would be a huge red flag.
Over
the next several weeks, I listened to a series of messages left by
Detective Simon, updating Santos on his investigation of Teltec. It was
reassuring for my bosses to know that the detective wasn’t coming up with
anything new. (In another of those improbable small-world coincidences,
Detective Simon—still with the LA Sheriff’s Department, now as a Reserve
Chief—is the
twin brother of my coauthor, Bill Simon.)
In the middle of all this, every now and then I’d recall that tantalizing piece
of information I’d been given about one of the charges against Kevin
Poulsen, for a hack that Eric said he had taken part in: the radio contest that
had supposedly won Eric a Porsche, and Poulsen himself two more. At
other odd moments, I’d remember the contest I’d heard on the radio while
driving to Vegas that dreary day not long after my half-brother’s death.
Finally those two items collided in my brain.
Eric had told Lewis and me that Poulsen’s radio contest gambit was
based on hacking into the phone company switch at the central office that
handled the radio station’s lines. I thought there might be a way to do the
same kind of thing without even having to mess with the switch. KRTH
broadcast from offices not too far from Dave’s, and both were served by the
same central office.
To start, I’d need a phone number other than the 800
number the disk
jockey gave out on the air. Calling an internal department at PacBell, I
asked for the “POTS number” for the 800 number. (“POTS” stands for—are
you ready for this?—“plain old telephone service”; it’s a standard, everyday
term used around the phone company.) I needed the POTS number because
the 800 number used for the radio contest had a “choke” placed on it,
limiting the flow of calls that could come in from each part of the station’s
broadcast area, and my plan wouldn’t work if any of my calls were being
choked. The lady I was talking to didn’t even ask what my name was or
whether
I worked for Pacific Bell; she just gave me the number.
At Dave Harrison’s, I programmed the speed calling feature on four of
his phone lines, so that all I had to do to dial directly in to the POTS
number at the radio station was press “9#.” I was counting on the fact that
calls routed through the 800 number would take just a bit longer to connect.
Then, too, the numbers for Dave’s office were switched through the same
central office as the station’s POTS number, meaning that our calls would
be completed instantaneously. But would those minuscule advantages, plus
using multiple telephone lines, be enough to make a difference?
Once this was all set up, Lewis, Terry Hardy, Dave, and I each sat at a
phone, ready to call. We could hardly wait for the contest to be announced.
Caller number seven was always the winner. We just had to keep calling in
until one of us was the seventh caller.
As soon as we heard the cue to start calling—the jingle “the best oldies
on radio”—we quickly punched in “9#.” Every
time we got through and
heard the DJ say, “You’re caller number ____,” and give a number less than
seven, we’d disconnect and quickly dial “9#” again. Over and over.
The third time I speed-dialed, I heard, “You’re caller number seven!”
I shouted into the phone,
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