Matt Ranney, at NEC in Dallas, was willing to create a dial-in account for me, based on my story that I was visiting temporarily from the NEC facility in San Jose, California, and needed local connectivity—though first I had to convince his boss as well. Once I was logged in, it was easy to get root using one of the exploits I had found in my earlier hack into Sun. Adding a backdoor to the log-in program, I gave myself a secret password—".hackman."—that allowed me to log in to anyone’s account, including root. With another tool from my hacker’s bag of tricks, I "tweaked the checksum," so the backdoored version of log-in would be less likely to be detected.