Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

Ghost in the Wires is a great book. It's full of fabulous stories like this, all true.

Upon reading it years ago, I finally learned the explanation for why Netcom never billed me for years of continuous dial-up CSLIP service. Kevin had hacked Netcom and deleted their accounting records.

View on HN

wow, would that have been 90/91? while at UK uni a few of us had a shell account at Netcom. we'd X25 from our uni to a telnet relay in london and used netcom for unix/shell access. we did not get reliably billed for a long time! thought at the time it was just UK/US banking issues. i wonder if Mitnick was why! will have to re-read the book. thanks for the memory!

Not sure if Kevin's Netcom escapades are responsible for you not getting billed for a shell account. I had two Netcom accounts (actually one account with two services). I was continuously billed ($19/mo?) for the shell account, but I was never billed ($6/hr) for the CSLIP account. Somewhere I read that Kevin had wiped the accounting records for CSLIP. I'm not sure of the level of detail described in his book. Maybe I'll read it again.

I ran that CSLIP connection continuously for many years. I would have paid them if they had ever billed me.

Natwests main security limitations was a few seconds to a dial up account in order to upload a batch file of bank accounts to transfer money around.

+1, a very fun read!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com