To "direct connect" with computers, you will need their phone numbers. Very often you can call up a company and ask the switchboard operator for the computer department and/or computer lines. If that doesn't work, try calling individual offices at the firm and ask if they know how to access the company computer from their home computers. If they don't know the phone numbers, perhaps they have a terminal program on their office com-puter which has the phone number stored for use.
Phone books are a big help. First there are the internal kind: companies and other organizations will have a directory of people who work there, with their extension numbers. Internal directories might also be of the kind that list numbers for the different departments; some go so far as to list home phone numbers and
addresses of the people who work there. Names can be used to pretend familiarity with the people you speak to when you call. But you won't even have to call and ask for dial-up lines if those numbers are listed in the di-rectory.
A second useful source is phone company data grade line directories....
When a person speaks on the telephone, it doesn't matter if every once in a while the voice on the other end gets a bit fuzzy, or if the tone gets momentarily higher or lower. When you're trans-ferring data between computers, however, audio noise can be a problem. So the telephone company has special lines which offices can install (for a price) to ease the flow of data between telecom-munications devices such as moderns. If you can et a data grade line telephone book, you will have 9 found a huge and wonderful collection of computer phone numbers (and fax numbers too). Many hack-ers get theirs by scavenging.
The third way phone books can be helpful is by looking in the public white pages and yellow pages that every phone owner gets for free. Large corn-Panies will own big blocks of telephone numbers, with each office or extension being one digit differ-ent from the preceding one. To call the different departments at Company J,
you would dial 390-WXYZ. The 390 stays the same for every de-partment, but the last four digits change for each phone line. So turn on your computer and type up a text file listing every occurrence of those last four digits you see listed for that company in the phone book. Then sort the list and try calling everything in that
exchange that is not on your list.
It can be helpful to use a criss-cross directory for this task. Criss-cross directories are sorted by number, not name, so if you know that Company J's numbers fall into the 390- range, using such a direc-tory you will have an even bigger list of numbers to avoid. This makes the job of calling every potential number much quicker and easier.
Software is available to repeatedly dial up a se-ries of phone numbers, reporting on whether a mo-dem is connected. These programs, often available on hacker and cracker BBSs, are known by many names: "WarGames Dialers," "autodialers," or "demon dialers." If you can't find such a program, write one for yourself; it's simple to do and will cost you only a few hours of time.
Once you have your autodialer, be very careful how you use it. The phone company security patrol knows what you're doing when you make that many calls that quickly, and with such precision. I've often thought it would be a good idea to com-bine one of those computerized telemarketer ma-chines with an autodialer. That way everything looks legit: if a person picks up, they get a short re-corded message: if a modem picks up, they get a callback later.
