The Lunatic's Guide to Hacking Into Anyone's Voicemail
A simple steel headed fire axe is capable of hacking into many things
The News of the World, the British tabloid tasked with reporting the news of the world, closed its doors this weekend, in the outfall of a massive phone hacking scandal. Investigators working for the paper are alleged to have hacked into the voicemail boxes of various figures, recording, manipulating and deleting messages, all in the course of gathering the world's news. People who have suffered these intrusions include politicians, British celebrities, real celebrities and most damningly, the victims of crimes. Editors have been arrested, the public has shat and in an attempt to control the scandal, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the paper, decided to pull the plug on it, depriving the world from its only source of news.
PIN Guessing
The simplest and often most effective technique to hack into someone's voicemail system is to simply guess their PIN. The default PINs assigned to each voicemail box are the best places to start -- due to sloping foreheads and the time constraints of today's busy eating-lifestyles, many users don't reset the default PINs. Simple PINs like 1111, 1234 are also good guesses, as are the last four digits of your target's phone number. If you have access to your target's naked body, check them carefully for any tattoos of four digit numbers.Social Engineering
Social engineering is the term for tricking someone into providing access to a secure system. Computer nerds came up with the term because they imagined it to be like hacking a person's brain, except instead of a person it's a low level customer support person, and instead of a brain, it's a mushy cellular mass which is incapable of giving a fuck.In the case of hacking into someone's voicemail, this is as simple as calling customer support and asking to reset the PIN of your target's voicemail box. By claiming to be your target, and that you've forgotten her PIN, and the answer to her secret question, and then crying a bit, you get the weary, underpaid CSR to relent and reset the PIN.
Just Stand Really Close
If you know where your target likes to speak on the phone, you could simply try standing very close to that spot while they're using their phone, so you can see them enter their PIN.
Swordfish It
There's always the possibility of doing "real" computer hacking on the voicemail system. To do this, you'll need a mainframe, and a GUI, and a BIOS and eight keyboards, and a T1 line and some other things. Get all those things, put them in a heap in the middle of your living room, and then call the Geek Squad, who should be able to help you with the rest.Example:Fuck Best Buy. That's all I have to say about that. That's all anyone ever needs to say about anything.
Dummy Phone
By replacing your target's phone with a duplicate, you can record them entering their PIN and then divert them to a dummy mailbox which doesn't contain any voicemails of you promising to make them happy. To do this, you'll need excellent sleight-of-hand skills as well as an exact copy of your target's phone (many phone manufacturers
With an Axe
A simple steel-headed fire axe is capable of hacking into many things, like the side door of the AT&T data center off 4th and Elm, as well as the objections of the wan folk who dwell within, and even the case of the servers which house the hard drive containing your target's voicemail messages. This is hacking in its most prototypical sense, and will make you feel like a bigger person, and also a bit, ironically enough, like a dwarf.
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