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<H1>Kevin Mitnick</H1>
<P>
<STRONG>An excerpt from <EM>Takedown</EM>.</STRONG>
<P>
<IMG SRC="mitnick.gif" ALIGN=LEFT ALT="" BORDER=0 HSPACE=0>
Who is Kevin Mitnick? The picture that emerged after his arrest in
Raleigh, N.C. last February was of a 31-year old computer programmer, who
had been given a number of chances to get his life together but each time
was seduced back to the dark side of the computer world.
Kevin David Mitnick reached adolescence in suburban <A HREF="http://www.ci.la.ca.us/">Los Angeles</A> in
the late 1970s, the same time the personal computer industry was exploding
beyond its hobbyist roots. His parents were divorced, and in a
lower-middle-class environment that lacked adventure and in which he was
largely a loner and an underachiever, he was seduced by the power he could
gain over the telephone network. The underground culture of phone phreaks
had already flourished for more than a decade, but it was now in the middle
of a transition from the analog to the digital world. Using a personal
computer and modem it became possible to commandeer a phone company's
digital central office switch by dialing in remotely, and Kevin became
adept at doing so. Mastery of a local telephone company switch offered more
than just free calls: It opened a window into the lives of other people to
eavesdrop on the rich and powerful, or on his own enemies.
<P>
Mitnick soon fell in with an informal phone phreak gang that met
irregularly in a pizza parlor in <A HREF="http://www.itlnet.com/main/holywood.html">Hollywood</A>. Much of what they did fell
into the category of pranks, like taking over directory assistance and
answering operator calls by saying, "Yes, that number is
eight-seven-five-zero and a half. Do you know how to dial the half,
ma'am?" or changing the class of service on someone's home phone to
payphone status, so that whenever they picked up the receiver a recorded
voice asked them to deposit twenty cents. But the group seemed to have a
mean streak as well. One of its members destroyed files of a <A HREF="http://www.zpub.com/sf/">San
Francisco</A>-based computer time-sharing company, a crime that went unsolved
for more than a year -- until a break-in at a Los Angeles telephone
company switching center led police to the gang.
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM><FONT SIZE=+1>The case was actually solved when a jilted girlfriend
of one of the gang went to the police...</FONT></EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
That break-in occurred over Memorial Day weekend in 1981, when
Kevin and two friends decided to physically enter <A HREF="http://www.pacbell.com/">Pacific Bell</A>'s COSMOS
phone center in downtown Los Angeles. COSMOS, or Computer System for
Mainframe Operations, was a database used by many of the nation's phone
companies for controlling the phone system's basic recordkeeping functions.
The group talked their way past a security guard and ultimately found the
room where the COSMOS system was located. Once inside they took lists of
computer passwords, including the combinations to the door locks at nine
Pacific Bell central offices and a series of operating manuals for the
COSMOS system.. To facilitate later social engineering they planted their
pseudonyms and phone numbers in a rolodex sitting on one of the desks in
the room. With a flourish one of the fake names they used was "John
Draper," who was an actual computer programmer also known as the
legendary phone phreak, <A HREF="http://www.well.com/user/crunch/">Captain Crunch</A>, the phone numbers were actually
misrouted numbers that would ring at a coffee shop pay phone in Van Nuys.
<P>
The crime was far from perfect, however. A telephone company
manager soon discovered the phony numbers and reported them to the local
police, who started an investigation. The case was actually solved when a
jilted girlfriend of one of the gang went to the police, and Kevin and his
friends were soon arrested. The group was charged with destroying data
over a computer network and with stealing operator's manuals from the
telephone company. Kevin, 17 years old at the time, was relatively lucky,
and was sentenced to spend only three months in the Los Angeles Juvenile
Detention Center, followed by a year's probation.
<P>
A run-in with the police might have persuaded most bright kids to
explore the many legal ways to have computer adventures, but Mitnick
appeared to be obsessed by some twisted vision. Rather than developing his
computer skills in creative and productive ways, he seemed interested only
in learning enough short-cuts for computer break-ins and dirty tricks to
continue to play out a fantasy that led to collision after collision with
the police throughout the 1980s. He obviously loved the attention and the
mystique his growing notoriety was bringing. Early on, after seeing the
1975 Robert Redford movie <A HREF="http://us.imdb.com/M/title-exact?three+days+of+the+condor"><EM>Three Days of the Condor</EM></A>, he had adopted Condor
as his <EM>nom de guerre</EM>. In the film Redford plays the role of a
hunted <A HREF="http://www.odci.gov/">CIA</A>
researcher who uses his experience as an Army signal corpsman to manipulate
the phone system and avoid capture. Mitnick seemed to view himself as the
same kind of daring man on the run from the law.
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM><FONT SIZE=+1>After he was released, he obtained the license plate
"X HACKER" for his Nissan...</FONT></EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
His next arrest was in 1983 by campus police at the <A
HREF="http://www.usc.edu">University of Southern California</A>, where
he had gotten into minor trouble a few years
earlier, when he was caught using a university computer to gain illegal
access to the <A HREF="http://hello.kaleida.com/u/hopkins/arpanet/index-small.html">ARPAnet</A>. This time he was discovered sitting at a computer
in a campus terminal room, breaking into a <A HREF="http://www.dtic.dla.mil/defenselink/pubs/pentagon/index.html">Pentagon</A> computer over the
ARPAnet, and was sentenced to six months at the California Youth
Authority's Karl Holton Training School, a juvenile prison in <A HREF="http://www.stocktonet.com/">Stockton</A>,
California. After he was released, he obtained the license plate "X
HACKER" for his <A HREF="http://www.nissanmotors.com/">Nissan</A> but he was still very much in the computer break-in
business. Several years later he went underground for more than a year
after being accused of tampering with a <A HREF="http://www.trw.com/">TRW</A> credit reference computer; an
arrest warrant was issued, but it later vanished from police records
without explanation.
<P>
By 1987, Mitnick seemed to be making an effort to pull his life
together, and he began living with a woman who was taking a computer class
with him at a local vocational school. After a while, however, his
obsession drew him back, and this time his use of illegal telephone
credit card numbers led police investigators to the apartment he was
sharing with his girlfriend in <A HREF="http://www.adnetsol.com//chamber/tohome.html">Thousand Oaks</A>, California. He was convicted
of stealing software from the <A HREF="http://www.sco.com/">Santa Cruz Operation</A>, a California software
company, and in December 1987, he was sentenced to 36 months probation.
That brush with the police, and the resultant wrist slap, seemed only
increase his sense of omnipotence.
<P>
In 1987 and 1988, Kevin and a friend, Lenny DiCicco, fought a
pitched electronic battle against scientists at <A HREF="http://www.research.digital.com/">Digital Equipment's Palo Alto research laboratory</A>. Mitnick had become obsessed with obtaining a copy
of <A HREF="http://www.digital.com/">Digital</A>'s <A HREF="http://www.okstate.edu/cis_info/cis_manual/vms_toc.html">VMS</A> minicomputer operating system, and was trying to do so by
gaining entry to the company's corporate computer network, known as
Easynet. The computers at Digital's Palo Alto laboratory looked easiest, so
every night with remarkable persistence Mitnick and DiCicco would launch
their modem attacks from a small Calabasas, California company where
DiCicco had a computer support job. Although Reid discovered the attacks
almost immediately, he didn't know where they were coming from, nor did the
local police or FBI, because Mitnick was manipulating the telephone
network's switches to disguise the source of the modem calls.
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM><FONT SIZE=+1>...he agreed to one year in prison and six months in a
counseling program for his computer "addiction."</FONT></EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
The FBI can easily serve warrants and get trap-and-trace
information from telephone companies, but few of its agents know how to
interpret the data they provide. If the bad guy is actually holed up at the
address that corresponds to the telephone number, they're set. But if the
criminal has electronically broken into to the telephone company's local
switch and scrambled the routing tables, they're clueless. Kevin had easily
frustrated their best attempts at tracking him through the telephone
network using wiretaps and traces. He would routinely use two computer
terminals each night -- one for his forays into Digital's computers, the
other as a lookout that scanned the telephone company computers to see if
his trackers were getting close. At one point, a team of law enforcement
and telephone security agents thought they had tracked him down, only to
find that Mitnick had diverted the telephone lines so as to lead his
pursuers not to his hideout in Calabasas, but to an apartment in Malibu.
Mitnick, it seemed, was a tough accomplice, for even as they had
been working together he had been harassing DiCicco by making fake calls to
DiCicco's employer, claiming to be a Government agent and saying that
DiCicco was in trouble with the <A HREF="http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/prod/">Internal Revenue Service</A>. The frustrated
DiCicco confessed to his boss, who notified DEC and the FBI, and Mitnick
soon wound up in federal court in Los Angeles. Although DEC claimed that
he had stolen software worth several million dollars, and had cost DEC
almost $200,000 in time spent trying to keep him out of their computers,
Kevin pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and one count of
possessing illegal long-distance access codes.
<P>
It was the fifth time that Mitnick had been apprehended for a
computer crime, and the case attracted nationwide attention because, in an
unusual plea bargain, he agreed to one year in prison and six months in a
counseling program for his computer "addiction." It was a strange defense
tactic, but a federal judge, after initially balking, bought the idea that
there was some sort of psychological parallel between the obsession Mitnick
had for breaking in to computer systems and an addict's craving for drugs.
After he finished his jail time and his halfway-house counseling
sentence for the 1989 Digital Equipment conviction Mitnick moved to <A
HREF="http://www.vegas.com/">Las Vegas</A> and took a low-level computer
programming position for a mailing list
company. His mother had moved there, as had a woman who called herself
<A HREF="http://www.phillynews.com/online/cyber/hack17.htm">Susan
Thunder</A> who had been part of Mitnick's
<A HREF="http://farmr4.med.uth.tmc.edu/Micellaneous/JARGON30/JARGON_P/PHREAKIN.HTML">phone
phreak</A> gang in the
early 1980s, and with whom he now became reacquainted. It was during this
period that he tried to "social engineer" me over the phone.
In early 1992 Mitnick moved back to the <A HREF="http://www.west.net/~rdg/wvw.html">San Fernando Valley</A> area
after his half-brother died of an apparent heroin overdose. He briefly
worked for his father in construction, but then took a job he found
through a friend of his father's at the Tel Tec Detective Agency . Soon
after he began, someone was discovered illegally using a commercial
database system on the agency's behalf, and Kevin was once again the
subject of an FBI investigation. In September the Bureau searched his
apartment, as well as the home and workplace of another member of the
original phone phreak gang. Two months later a federal judge issued a
warrant for Mitnick's arrest for having violated the terms of his 1989
probation. There were two charges: illegally accessing a phone company
computer, and associating with one of the people with whom he'd originally
been arrested in 1981. His friends claimed Mitnick had been set up by the
detective firm; whatever the truth, when the FBI came to arrest him, Kevin
Mitnick had vanished.
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM><FONT SIZE=+1>His escape, subsequently reported in the Southern
California newspapers, made the authorities look like bumblers who were no
match for a brilliant and elusive cyberthief.</FONT></EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
In late 1992 someone called the <A HREF="http://www.ca.gov/dmv/dmv.html">California Department of Motor Vehicles</A> office in <A HREF="http://www.sna.com/access/sacramento/">Sacramento</A>, and using a valid law enforcement requester
code, attempted to have driver's license photographs of a police informer
faxed to a number in Studio City, near Los Angeles. Smelling fraud, D.M.V.
security officers checked the number and discovered that it was assigned to
a Kinko's copy shop, which they staked out before faxing the photographs.
But somehow the spotters didn't see their quarry until he was going out the
door of the copy shop. They started after him, but he outran them across
the parking lot and disappeared around the corner, dropping the documents
as he fled. The agents later determined that they were covered with Kevin
Mitnick's fingerprints. His escape, subsequently reported in the Southern
California newspapers, made the authorities look like bumblers who were no
match for a brilliant and elusive cyberthief.
<P>
<A HREF="mitnick-links.html">More links</A>
<P>
<HR>
<P>
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