Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.