UNDERGROUND
someone in a position of power into doing something for you. It always involved a ruse of some sort.
Mendax decided he would social engineer a password out of one of Minerva's users. He had downloaded a partial list of Minerva users another PI hacker had generously posted for those talented enough to make use of it. This list was maybe two years old, and incomplete, but it contained 30-odd pages of Minerva account usernames, company names, addresses, contact names and telephone and fax numbers. Some of them would probably still be valid.
Mendax had a deep voice for his age; it would have been impossible to even contemplate social engineering without it. Cracking adolescent male voices were the kiss of death for would-be social engineers. But even though he had the voice, he didn't have the office or the Sydney phone number if the intended victim wanted a number to call back on. He found a way to solve the Sydney phone number by poking around until he dug up a number with Sydney's 02 area code which was permanently engaged. One down, one to go.
Next problem: generate some realistic office background noise. He could hardly call a company posing as an OTC official to cajole a password when the only background noise was birds tweeting in the fresh country air.
No, he needed the same background buzz as a crowded office in downtown Sydney. Mendax had a tape recorder, so he could pre-record the sound of an office and play it as back- ground when he called companies on the Minerva list. The only hurdle was finding the appropriate office noise. Not even the local post office would offer a believable noise level. With none easily accessible, he decided to make his own audible office clutter. It wouldn't be easy. With a single track on his recording device, he couldn't dub in sounds on top of each other: he had to make all the noises simultaneously.
First, he turned on the TV news, down very low, so it just hummed in the background. Then he set up a long document to print on his Commodore MPS 801 printer. He removed