ITT?”(The initials stood for International Telephone and Telegraph.)
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you know where I can get any codes?”
He was asking me about ITT access codes. Once you had a code, you could simply dial a local ITT access number and punch in the access code, followed by the long-distance number you wanted to call. If you used someone else’s code, your call would be billed to that poor subscriber, and you wouldn’t have to pay a cent.
I smiled. Roy and I were going to get along just fine.
During my court-ordered counseling sessions in 1981 and 1982, we basically just chatted and became good friends. Roy told me that what I had been doing was exceedingly tame compared to the crimes of his other patients. Years later, in 1988, when I got into trouble again, he wrote a letter to the judge, explaining that I was driven to hack not by malicious or criminal motives, but by a compulsive disorder. I was, he said, “addicted” to hacking.
As far as my attorney and I have been able to determine, this was the first time that hacking had ever been labeled that way and placed on par with a drug, alcohol, gambling, or sex addiction. When the judge heard the diagnosis of addiction and realized that I suffered from an ailment, she accepted our plea agreement.
On December 22, 1982, three days before Christmas, nearly midnight, I was in the computer room in Salvatori Hall on the campus of USC, the University of Southern California, near downtown LA, with my hacking buddy Lenny DiCicco, a lanky, athletic six-footer who was to become a close, trusted hacking partner… and future double-crosser.
We had been hacking into the USC systems over dial-up modems but were frustrated with their slow speeds. A little exploring had turned up the tempting fact that a building called Salvatori Hall had a group of DEC TOPS-20 mainframes that were connected to the Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet. Being on campus would give us much faster access to systems on campus.
Using a newly discovered vulnerability that Lenny had managed to pickpocket from Dave Kompel at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society) conference we attended a week earlier, we had already gained full system (or “wheel”) privileges on all of the studentDEC 20’s. But we wanted to get as many passwords as possible. Even though we had system administrator privileges, the system was configured to encrypt all passwords.
No sweat. I started searching through the email accounts of staff members who had wheel privileges. Hunting around inside the system led me to the mail of the accounting department, which was responsible for issuing usernames and passwords. When I searched that account’s email, it was chock-full of messages handing out usernames and passwords in
plain text
. Jackpot!
Knowing it was risky, I sent the entire email file to the printer. About fifteen minutes after I gave the Print command, an operator dropped a thick printout into the student bin. In a roomful of students at computer terminals, how do you check that you’re not being watched, but do it in a way that doesn’t make you look suspicious? Doing my best, I picked up the printout and carried it back to where Lenny and I were working.
A while later, two campus cops charged into the room and rushed directly toward Lenny and me, shouting,
“Freeze!”
Apparently I had become notorious. They knew which of us was their real target, and they knew my name. Later, I learned that one of the administrators, Jon Solomon, had been at the same DECUS convention that Lenny and I had attended days earlier. Jon saw me in the computer lab and recognized me. He called Dave Kompel, who had been part of the group that challenged me to break into DEC’s RSTS/E Development system when I was a student at Monroe High School. Kompel told him to call the campus police and have me arrested.
They grabbed the stack of printouts with all those passwords. Because I was already on probation,
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you know where I can get any codes?”
He was asking me about ITT access codes. Once you had a code, you could simply dial a local ITT access number and punch in the access code, followed by the long-distance number you wanted to call. If you used someone else’s code, your call would be billed to that poor subscriber, and you wouldn’t have to pay a cent.
I smiled. Roy and I were going to get along just fine.
During my court-ordered counseling sessions in 1981 and 1982, we basically just chatted and became good friends. Roy told me that what I had been doing was exceedingly tame compared to the crimes of his other patients. Years later, in 1988, when I got into trouble again, he wrote a letter to the judge, explaining that I was driven to hack not by malicious or criminal motives, but by a compulsive disorder. I was, he said, “addicted” to hacking.
As far as my attorney and I have been able to determine, this was the first time that hacking had ever been labeled that way and placed on par with a drug, alcohol, gambling, or sex addiction. When the judge heard the diagnosis of addiction and realized that I suffered from an ailment, she accepted our plea agreement.
On December 22, 1982, three days before Christmas, nearly midnight, I was in the computer room in Salvatori Hall on the campus of USC, the University of Southern California, near downtown LA, with my hacking buddy Lenny DiCicco, a lanky, athletic six-footer who was to become a close, trusted hacking partner… and future double-crosser.
We had been hacking into the USC systems over dial-up modems but were frustrated with their slow speeds. A little exploring had turned up the tempting fact that a building called Salvatori Hall had a group of DEC TOPS-20 mainframes that were connected to the Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet. Being on campus would give us much faster access to systems on campus.
Using a newly discovered vulnerability that Lenny had managed to pickpocket from Dave Kompel at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society) conference we attended a week earlier, we had already gained full system (or “wheel”) privileges on all of the studentDEC 20’s. But we wanted to get as many passwords as possible. Even though we had system administrator privileges, the system was configured to encrypt all passwords.
No sweat. I started searching through the email accounts of staff members who had wheel privileges. Hunting around inside the system led me to the mail of the accounting department, which was responsible for issuing usernames and passwords. When I searched that account’s email, it was chock-full of messages handing out usernames and passwords in
plain text
. Jackpot!
Knowing it was risky, I sent the entire email file to the printer. About fifteen minutes after I gave the Print command, an operator dropped a thick printout into the student bin. In a roomful of students at computer terminals, how do you check that you’re not being watched, but do it in a way that doesn’t make you look suspicious? Doing my best, I picked up the printout and carried it back to where Lenny and I were working.
A while later, two campus cops charged into the room and rushed directly toward Lenny and me, shouting,
“Freeze!”
Apparently I had become notorious. They knew which of us was their real target, and they knew my name. Later, I learned that one of the administrators, Jon Solomon, had been at the same DECUS convention that Lenny and I had attended days earlier. Jon saw me in the computer lab and recognized me. He called Dave Kompel, who had been part of the group that challenged me to break into DEC’s RSTS/E Development system when I was a student at Monroe High School. Kompel told him to call the campus police and have me arrested.
They grabbed the stack of printouts with all those passwords. Because I was already on probation,
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