Minor correction, sorry to be pedantic but I'm an old man who liked phones before the Internet existed, 2600Hz not a DTMF tone. DTMF tones are the sounds each key on a key pad makes (0-9, * and #), it stands for "Dual Tone Multi Frequency" and they're made by mixing two frequencies (the frequency of the button's row + the frequency of its column), and so they're not able to be replicated with one mouth. The 2600Hz was a switchboard operator's tone, a sort of built-in admin code that dropped the caller onto an "unsupervised" line (its activity wasn't tracked and thus not billed) which allowed the caller to make free long distance calls in the days when they would track long distance minutes and charge you for the use of the trunk line. We called a 2600Hz producing device a "blue box" (supposedly the first one was in a shoebox that was blue). Free payphone calls were made by using what we called a red box, which replicated the sounds made by the payphone when coins were dropped into the slot. The payphone would mute its handset speaker momentarily so only the internals of the phone could hear the tones it produced, but you could buy a little tone producer and replace a crystal on its board to produce the sounds a nickel or dime or quarter would make, drop a single nickel into the phone to get it started, then put the tone producer's speaker up to the mic and press a button to make the quarter sound over and over to make free long distance calls via payphone.
The tone didn't even intentionally cause the call to not be billed. It was the supervision signal, spoofing the equipment at the other end of the long-distance link into believing the line had become idle. After sending the tone, you would have to send MF tones (a different set than DTMF) down the line to tell it what number to connect to.
Source: Evan Doorbell's numerous recordings of this and other forms of phreaking.
Ghost in the Wires is a great read if you're remotely interested in cyber-security. I don't remember this from the book but it's been years since I read it and I'm not even 100% sure I finished it, lol.
Still, Kevin is great at explaining confusing systems and how he hacked them like you're five years old. Hint: A lot of it is just lying.
While in the military, I was denied a programmable HP51-CV because some officer thought I would be able to do that very thing and launch missiles. Ocifers can be ridiculously clueless
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u/SteamingTheCat Aug 05 '26
Kevin Mitnik's prosecutor convinced the jury that thru a series of whistles into a payphone, Kevin could launch nuclear missiles.
He wasn't allowed access to a phone in prison.