The stars must have been lined up in my favor. Within several hours, I intercepted a user, "david," logging into "ariel," one of Shimomura’s servers. By capturing david’s password using my network wiretap, I accessed Shimomura’s system and was into it for several days before I was noticed and booted off. Shimomura eventually realized that david had been hacked, and tried tracking me but hit a dead end. In hindsight, he was probably monitoring his own network traffic and saw what was going on.