Kevin MitnikKevin's Story
by Kevin Mitnick
I was reluctant to write this section because I was sure it would
sound self-serving. Well, okay, it is self-serving. But I've been contacted
by literally hundreds of people who want to know "who is Kevin Mitnick?".
For those who don't give a damn, please turn to Chapter 2. For everybody
else, here, for what it's worth, is my story.
Kevin Speaks Some hackers destroy people's files or entire bard drives;
they're called crackers or vandals. Some novice hackers don't bother
learning the technology, but simply download hacker tools to break into
computer systems; they're called script kiddies. More experienced hackers
with programming skills develop hacker programs and post them to the Web and
to bulletin board systems. And then there are individuals who have no
interest in the technology, but use the computer merely as a tool to aid
them in stealing money, goods, or services. Despite the media-created myth
of Kevin Mitnick, I'm not a malicious hacker. What I did wasn't even against
the law when I began, but became a crime after new legislation was passed. I
continued anyway, and was caught. My treatment by the federal government was
based not on the crimes, but on making an example of me. I did not deserve
to be treated like a terrorist or violent criminal: Having my residence
searched with a blank search warrant; being thrown into solitary for months;
denied the fundamental Constitutional rights guaranteed to anyone accused of
a crime; being denied not only bail but a bail hearing; and being forced to
spend years fighting to obtain the government's evidence so my court
appointed attorney could prepare my defense.
What about my right to a speedy trial? For years I was given a choice
every six months: sign a paper waiving your Constitutional right to a speedy
trial or go to trial with an attorney who is unprepared; I chose to sign.
But I'm getting ahead of my story. Starting Out my path was probably set
early in life. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, but bored. After my father split
when I was three, my mother worked as a waitress to support us. To see me
then an only child being raised by a mother who put in long, harried days on
a sometimes-erratic schedule would have been to see a youngster on his own
almost all his waking hours. I was my own babysitter. Growing up in a San
Fernando Valley community gave me the whole of Los Angeles to explore, and
by the age of twelve I had discovered a way to travel free throughout the
whole greater L.A. area. I realized one day while riding the bus that the
security of the bus transfer I had purchased relied on the unusual pattern
of the paper-punch that the drivers used to mark day, time and route on the
transfer slips. A friendly driver, answering my carefully-planted question,
told me where to buy that special type of punch. The transfers are meant to
let you change buses and continue a journey
to your destination, but I worked out how to use them to travel anywhere I
wanted to go for free. Obtaining blank transfers was a walk in the park: the
trash bins at the bus terminals were always filled with only-partly-used
books of transfers that the drivers tossed away at the end of their shifts.
With a pad of blanks and the punch, I could mark my own transfers and travel
anywhere that L.A. buses went. Before long, I had all but memorized the bus
schedules of the entire system. This was an early example of my surprising
memory for certain types of information; still, today I can remember phone
numbers, passwords and other items as far back as my childhood. Another
personal interest that surfaced at an early age was my fascination with
performing magic. Once I learned how a new trick worked, I would practice,
practice, and practice until I mastered it. To an extent, it was through
magic that I discovered the enjoyment in fooling people. From Phone Phreak,
to Hacker my first encounter with what I would eventually learn to call
social engineering came about during my high school years, when I met
another student who was caught up in a hobby called phone phreaking. Phone
phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone
network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees. He
showed me neat tricks he could do with a telephone, like obtaining any
information the phone company had on any customer, and using a secret test
number to make long-distances calls for free actually free only to us--I
found out much later that it wasn't a secret test number at all: the calls
were in fact being billed to some poor company's MCI account). That was my
introduction to social engineering-my kindergarten, so to speak. He and
another phone phreaker I met shortly thereafter let me listen in as they
each made pretext
calls to the phone company. I heard the things they said that made
them sound believable, I learned about different phone company offices,
lingo and procedures. But that "training" didn't last long; it didn't have
to. Soon I was doing it all on my own, learning as I went, doing it even
better than those first teachers. The course my life would follow for the
next fifteen years had been set.
One of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to
the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone
phreak. When he'd attempt to make a call from home, he'd get a message
telling him to deposit a dime, because the telephone company switch received
input that indicated he was calling from a pay phone.
I became absorbed in everything about telephones-not only the electronics,
switches, and computers; but also the corporate organization, the
procedures, and the terminology. After a while, I
probably knew more about the phone system than any single employee.
And, I had developed my social engineering skills to the point that, at
seventeen years old, I was able to talk most Telco employees into almost
anything, whether I was speaking with them in person or by telephone. My
hacking career started when I was in high school. Back then we used the term
hacker to mean a person who spent a great deal of time tinkering with
hardware and software, either to develop more
efficient programs or to bypass unnecessary steps and get the job done
more quickly. The term has now become a pejorative, carrying the meaning of
"malicious criminal." In these pages I use the term the way I have always
used it in its earlier, more benign sense. In late 1979, a group of fellow
hacker types who worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District dared me
to try hacking into The Ark, the computer system at Digital Equipment
Corporation used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software. I
wanted to be accepted by the guys in this hacker group so I could pick their
brains to learn more about operating systems. These new "friends" had
managed to get their hands on the dial-up number to the DEC computer system.
But they knew the dial-up number wouldn't do me any good: Without an account
name
and password, I'd never be able to get in. They were about to find out that
when you underestimate others, it can come back to bite you in
the butt. It turned out that, for me, even at that young age, hacking
into the DEC system was a pushover. Claiming to be Anton Chernoff, one of
the project's lead developers, I placed a simple phone call to the system
manager. I claimed I couldn't log into one of "my" accounts, and was
convincing enough to talk the guy into giving me accessing and allowing me
to select a password of my choice. As an extra level of protection, whenever
anyone dialed into the development system, the user also had to provide a
dial-up password. The system administrator told me the password. It was
"buffoon," which I guess described what he must have felt like later on,
when lie found out what had happened. In less than five minutes, I had
gained access to Digital's RSTE/E development system. And I wasn't logged on
as just as an ordinary user, but as someone with all the privileges of a
system developer. At first my new, so-called friends refused to believe I
had gained access to The Ark. One of them dialed up the system and shoved
the keyboard in front of me with a challenging look on his face. His mouth
dropped open as I matter-of-factly logged into a privileged account. I found
out later that they went off to another location and, the same day, started
downloading source-code components of the DEC operating system. And then it
was my turn to be floored. After they had downloaded all the software they
wanted, they called the corporate security department at DEC and told them
someone had hacked into the company's corporate network. And they gave my
name. My so-called friends first used my access to copy highly sensitive
source code, and then turned me in.
There was a lesson here, but not one I managed to learn easily.
Through the years to come, I would repeatedly get into trouble because I
trusted people who I thought were my friends. After high school I studied
computers at the Computer Learning Center in Los Angeles.
Within a few months, the school's computer manager realized I had found a
vulnerability in the operating system and gained full administrative
privileges on their IBM minicomputer. The best computer experts on their
teaching staff couldn't figure out how I had done this. In what may have
been one of the earliest examples of "hire the hacker," I was given an offer
I couldn't refuse: Do an honors project to enhance the school's computer
security, or face suspension for hacking the system. Of course I chose to do
the honors project, and ended up graduating Cum Laude with Honors. Becoming
a Social Engineer some people get out of bed each morning dreading their
daily work routine at the proverbial
salt mines. I've been lucky enough to enjoy my work. In particular you
can't imagine the challenge, reward, and pleasure I had in the time I spent
as a private investigator. I was honing my talents in the performance art
called social engineering-getting people to do things they wouldn't
ordinarily do for a stranger-and being paid for it. For me it wasn't
difficult becoming proficient in social engineering. My father's side of the
family had been in the sales field for generations, so the art of influence
and persuasion might have been an inherited trait. When you combine an
inclination for deceiving people with the talents of influence and
persuasion you arrive at the profile of a social engineer. You might say
there are two specialties within the job classification of con artist.
Somebody who swindles and cheats people out of their money belongs to one
sub-specialty, the grifter. Somebody who uses deception, influence, and
persuasion against businesses, usually targeting their information, belongs
to the other sub-specialty, the social engineer. From the time of my bus
transfer trick, when I was too young to know there was anything wrong with
what I was doing, I had begun to recognize a talent for finding out the
secrets I wasn't supposed to have. I built on that talent by using
deception, knowing the lingo, and developing a well-honed skill of
manipulation.
One way I used to work on developing the skills in my craft (if I may
call it a craft) was to pick out some piece of information I didn't really
care about and see if I could talk somebody on the other end of the phone
into providing it, just to improve my talents. In the same way I used to
practice my magic tricks, I practiced pretexting. Through these rehearsals,
I soon found I could acquire virtually any information I targeted. In
Congressional testimony before Senators Lieberman and Thompson years later,
I told them, "I have gained unauthorized access to computer systems at some
of the largest corporations on the planet, and have successfully penetrated
some of the most resilient computer systems ever developed. I have used both
technical and non-technical means to obtain the source code to various
operating systems and telecommunications devices to study their
vulnerabilities and their inner workings." All of this was really to satisfy
my own curiosity, see what I could do, and find out secret information about
operating systems, cell phones, and anything else that stirred my curiosity.
The train of events that would change my life started when I became the
subject of a July 4th, 1994 front-page, above-the-fold story in the New York
Times. Overnight, that one story turned my image from a little known
nuisance of a hacker into Public Enemy Number One of cyberspace. John
Markoff, the Media's grifter
"Combining technical wizardry with the ages-old guile of a grifter,
Kevin Mitnick is a computer programmer run amok." (The New York Times,
7/4/94.) Combining the ages-old desire to attain undeserved fortune with the
power to publish false and defamatory stories about his subjects on the
front page of the New York Times, John Markoff was
truly a technology reporter run amok. Markoff was to earn himself over $1
million by single-handedly creating what I label "The Myth of Kevin
Mitnick." He became very wealthy through the very same technique I used to
compromise computer systems and networks around the world: deception. In
this case however, the victim of the deception wasn't a single computer user
or system administrator, it was every person who trusted the news stories
published in the pages of the New York Times.
Cyberspace's Most Wanted Markoff's Times article was clearly designed to
land a contract for a book about my life story. I've never met Markoff, and
yet he has literally become a millionaire through his libelous and
defamatory "reporting" about me in the Times and in his 1991 book,
Cyberpunk. In his article, he included some dozens of allegations about me
that he stated as fact without citing his sources, and that even a minimal
process of fact-checking (which I thought all first-rate newspapers required
their reporters to do) would have revealed as being untrue or unproven. In
that single false and defamatory article, Markoff labeled me as
"cyberspace's most wanted,"
and as "one of the nation's most wanted computer criminals," without
justification, reason, or supporting evidence, using no more discretion than
a writer for a supermarket tabloid. In his slanderous article, Markoff
falsely claimed that I had wiretapped the FBI (I hadn't); that I had broken
into the computers at NORAD (which aren't even connected to any network on
the outside); and that I was a computer "vandal," despite the fact that I
had never intentionally damaged any computer I ever accessed. These, among
other outrageous allegations, were completely false and designed to create a
sense of fear about my
capabilities. In yet another breach of journalistic ethics, Markoff failed
to disclose in that article and in all of his subsequent articles-a
pre-existing relationship with me, a personal animosity based on my having
refused to participate in the book Cyberpunk In addition, I had cost him a
bundle of potential revenue by refusing to renew an option for a movie based
on the book. Markoff's article was also clearly designed to taunt America's
law enforcement agencies.
"...Law enforcement," Markoff wrote, "cannot seem to catch up with
him...." The article was deliberately framed to cast me as cyberspace's
Public Enemy Number One in order to influence the Department of Justice to
elevate the priority of my case. A few months later, Markoff and his cohort
Tsutomu Shimomura would both participate as de facto government agents in my
arrest, in violation of both federal law and journalistic ethics. Both would
be nearby when three blank warrants were used in an illegal search of my
residence, and be present at my arrest. And, during their investigation of
my activities, the two would also violate federal law by intercepting a
personal telephone call of mine. While making me out to be a villain,
Markoff, in a subsequent article, set up Shimomura as the number one hero of
cyberspace. Again he was violating journalistic ethics by not disclosing a
preexisting relationship: this hero in fact had been a personal friend of
Markoff's for years. My first encounter with Markoff had come in the late
eighties when he and his wife Katie Hafner contacted me while they were in
the process of writing Cyberpunk, which was to be the story of
three hackers: a German kid known as Pengo, Robert Morris, and myself.
What would my compensation be for participating? Nothing. I couldn't see the
point of giving them my story if they would profit from it and I wouldn't,
so I refused to help. Markoff gave me an ultimatum: either
interview with us or anything we hear from any source will be accepted
as the truth. He was clearly frustrated and annoyed that I would not
cooperate, and was letting me know he had the means to make me regret it. I
chose to stand my ground and would not cooperate despite his pressure
tactics. When published, the book portrayed me as "The Darkside Hacker." I
concluded that the authors had intentionally included unsupported, false
statements in order to get back at me
for not cooperating with them. By making my character appear more
sinister and casting me in a false light, they probably increased the sales
of the book. A movie producer phoned with great news: Hollywood was
interested in making a movie about the Darkside Hacker depicted in
Cyberpunk. I pointed out that the story was full of inaccuracies and
untruths about me, but he was still very excited about the project. I
accepted $5,000 for a two-year option, against an additional $45,000 if they
were able to get a production deal and move forward. When the option
expired, the production company asked for a six month extension. By this
time I was gainfully employed, and so had little motivation for seeing a
movie produced that showed me in such an unfavorable and false light. I
refused to go along with the extension. That killed the movie deal for
everyone, including Markoff, who had probably expected to make a great deal
of money from the project. Here was one more reason for
John Markoff to be vindictive towards me. Around the time Cyberpunk was
published, Markoff had ongoing email correspondence with his friend
Shimomura. Both of them were strangely interested in my whereabouts and what
I was doing. Surprisingly, one e-mail message contained intelligence that
they had learned I was attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and
had use of the student computer lab. Could it be
that Markoff and Shimomura were interested in doing another book about
me? Otherwise, why would they care what I was up to? Markoff in Pursuit Take
a step back to late 1992. I was nearing the end of my supervised release for
compromising Digital Equipment Corporation's corporate network. Meanwhile I
became aware that the government was trying to put together another case
against me, this one for conducting counter-intelligence to find out why
wiretaps had been placed on the phone lines of a Los Angeles P.II firm. In
my digging, I confirmed my suspicion: the Pacific Bell security people were
indeed investigating
the firm. So was a computer-crime deputy from the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department. (That deputy turns out to be, co-incidentally, the
twin brother of my co-author on this book. Small world.) About this time,
the Feds set up a criminal informant and sent him out to entrap me. They
knew I always tried to keep tabs on any agency investigating me. So they had
this informant befriend me and tip me off that I was being monitored. He
also shared with me the details of a computer system used at Pacific Bell
that would let me do counter-surveillance of their monitoring. When I
discovered his plot, I quickly turned the tables on him and exposed him for
credit-card fraud he was conducting while working for the government in an
informant capacity.
I'm sure the Feds appreciated that! My life changed on Independence Day,
1994 when my pager woke me early in the morning. The caller said I should
immediately pick up a copy of the New York Times. I couldn't believe it when
I saw that Markoff had not only written an article about me, but the Times
had placed it on the front page. The first thought that came to mind was for
my personal safety-now the government
would be substantially increasing their efforts to find me. I was
relieved that in an effort to demonize me, the Times had used a very
unbecoming picture. I wasn't fearful of being recognized they had chosen a
picture so out of date that it didn't look anything like me! As I began to
read the article, I realized that Markoff was setting himself up to write
the Kevin Mitnick book, just as he had always wanted. I simply could not
believe the New York Times would risk printing the egregiously false
statements that he had written about me. I felt helpless. Even if I had been
in a position to respond, I certainly would not have an audience equal to
the New York Times s to rebut Markoff's outrageous lies. While I can agree I
had been a pain in the ass, I had never destroyed information, nor used or
disclosed to others any information I had obtained. Actual losses by
companies from my hacking activities amounted to the cost of phone calls I
had made at
phone-company expense, the money spent by companies to plug the security
vulnerabilities that my attacks had revealed, and in a few instances
possibly causing companies to reinstall their operating systems and
applications for fear I might have modified software in a way that would
allow me future access. Those companies would have remained vulnerable to
far worse damage if my activities hadn't made them aware of the weak links
in their security chain. Though I had caused some losses, my actions and
intent were not malicious ... and then John Markoff changed the world's
perception of the danger I represented. The power of one unethical reporter
from such an influential newspaper to write a false and defamatory story
about anyone should haunt each and every one of us. The next target might be
you.
After my arrest I was transported to the County Jail in Smithfield,
North Carolina, where the U.S. Marshals Service ordered jailers to place me
into `the hole'-solitary confinement. Within a week, federal prosecutors and
my attorney reached an agreement that I couldn't refuse. I could be moved
out of solitary on the condition that I waived my fundamental rights and
agreed to: a) no bail hearing; b) no preliminary hearing; and, c) no phone
calls, except to my attorney and two family members. Sign, and I could get
out of solitary. I signed.
The federal prosecutors in the case played every dirty trick in the
book up until I was released nearly five years later. I was repeatedly
forced to waive my rights in order to be treated like any other accused. But
this was the Kevin Mitnick case: There were no rules. No requirement to
respect the Constitutional rights of the accused. My case was not about
justice, but about the government's determination to win at all costs. The
prosecutors had made vastly overblown claims to the court about the damage I
had caused and the threat I represented, and the media had gone to town
quoting the sensationalist statements; now it was too late for the
prosecutors to back down. The government could not afford to lose the
Mitnick case. The world was watching.
I believe that the courts bought into the fear generated by media
coverage, since many of the more ethical journalists had picked up the
"facts" from the esteemed New York Times and repeated them. The
media-generated myth apparently even scared law enforcement officials. A
confidential document obtained by my attorney showed that the U.S. Marshals
Service had issued a warning to all law enforcement agents never to reveal
any personal information to me; otherwise, they might
find their lives electronically destroyed. Our Constitution requires that
the accused be presumed innocent before trial, thus granting all
citizens the right to a bail hearing, where the accused has the opportunity
to be represented by counsel, present evidence, and cross-examine witnesses.
Unbelievably, the government had been able to circumvent these protections
based on the false hysteria generated by irresponsible reporters like John
Markoff. Without precedent, I was held as a pre-trial detainee-a person in
custody pending trial or sentencing-for over four and a half years. The
judge's refusal to grant me a bail hearing was litigated all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. In the end, my defense team advised me that I had set
another precedent: I was the only federal detainee in U.S. history denied a
bail hearing. This meant the government never had to meet the burden
of proving that there were no conditions of release that would reasonably
assure my appearance in court. At least in this case, federal prosecutors
did not dare to allege that I could start a nuclear
war by whistling into a payphone, as other federal prosecutors had
done in an earlier case. The most serious charges against me were that I had
copied proprietary source code for various cellular phone handsets and
popular operating systems. Yet the prosecutors alleged publicly and to the
court that I had caused collective losses
exceeding $300 million to several companies. The details of the loss
amounts are still under seal with the court, supposedly to protect the
companies involved; my defense team, though, believes the prosecution's
request to seal the information was initiated to cover up their gross
malfeasance in my case. It's also worth noting that none of the victims in
my case had reported any losses to the Securities and Exchange Commission as
required by law. Either several multinational companies violated Federal
law-in the process deceiving the SEC, stockholders,
and analysts--or the losses attributable to my hacking were, in fact,
too trivial to be reported. In his book he Fugitive Game, Jonathan Li wan
reports that within a week of the New York Times front-page story, Markoff's
agent had "brokered a package deal" with the publisher Walt
Disney Hyperion for a book about the campaign to track me down. The advance
was to be an estimated $750,000. According to Littman, there was to be a
Hollywood movie, as well, with Miramax handing over $200,000 for the option
and "a total $650,000 to be paid upon commencement of filming." A
confidential source has recently informed
me that Markoff's deal was in fact much more than Littman had originally
thought. So John Markoff got a million dollars, more or less, and I got five
years. One book that examines the legal aspects of my case was written by a
man who had himself been a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's
office, a colleague of the attorneys who prosecuted me. In his book
Spectacular Computer Crimes, Buck Bloombecker wrote, "It grieves me to have
to write about my former colleagues in less than flattering terms.... I'm
haunted by Assistant United States Attorney James Asperger's admission that
much of the argument used to keep Mitnick behind bars was based on rumors
which didn't pan out." He goes on to say, "It was bad enough that the
charges prosecutors made in court were spread to millions of readers by
newspapers around the country. But it is much worse that these untrue
allegations were a large part of the basis for keeping Mitnick behind bars
without the possibility of posting bail?" He continues at some length,
writing about the ethical standards that prosecutors should live by, and
then writes, "Mitnick's case suggests that the false allegations used to
keep him in custody also prejudiced the court's consideration of a fair
sentence." In his 1999 Forbes article, Adam L. Penenberg eloquently
described my situation this way: "Mitnick's crimes were curiously innocuous.
He broke into corporate computers, but no evidence indicates that he
destroyed data. Or sold anything he copied. Yes, he pilfered software but in
doing so left it behind." The article said that my crime was "To thumb his
nose at the costly computer security systems employed by large
corporations." And in the book The Fugitive Game, author Jonathan Littman
noted, "Greed the government could understand. But a hacker who wielded
power for its own sake ... was something they couldn't grasp." Elsewhere in
the same book, Littman wrote: U.S. Attorney James Sanders admitted to Judge
Pfaelzer that Mitnick's damage to DEC was not the $4 million that had made
the headlines but $160,000. Even that amount was not damage done by Mitnick,
but the rough cost of tracing the security weakness that his incursions had
brought to DEC's attention. The government acknowledged it had no evidence
of the wild claims that had helped hold Mitnick without bail and in solitary
confinement. No proof Mitnick had ever compromised the security of the NSA.
No proof that Mitnick had ever issued a false press release for Security
Pacific Bank. No proof that Mitnick ever changed the TRW credit report of a
judge. But the judge, perhaps influenced by the terrifying media coverage,
rejected the plea bargain and sentenced Mitnick to a longer term then even
the government wanted. Throughout the years spent as a hacker hobbyist, I've
gained unwanted notoriety, been written up in numerous news reports and
magazine articles, and had four books written about me. Markoff and
Shimomura's libelous book was made into a feature film called Takedown. When
the script found its way onto the Internet, many of my supporters picketed
Miramax Films to call public attention to the inaccurate and false
characterization of me. Without the help of many kind and generous people,
the motion picture would surely have falsely portrayed me as the Hannibal
Lector of cyberspace. Pressured by my supporters, the production company
agreed to settle the case on confidential terms to avoid me filing a libel
action against them.
Final Thoughts
Despite John Markoff's outrageous and libelous descriptions of me, my
crimes were simple crimes of computer trespass and making free telephone
calls. I've acknowledged since my arrest that the actions I took were
illegal, and that I committed invasions of privacy. But to suggest, without
justification, reason, or proof, as did the Markoff articles, that I had
deprived others of their money or property by computer or wire fraud, is
simply untrue, and unsupported by the evidence. My misdeeds were motivated
by curiosity: I wanted to know as much as I could about how phone networks
worked, and the ins and outs of computer security. I went from being a kid
who loved to perform magic tricks to becoming the world's most notorious
hacker, feared by
corporations and the government. As I reflect back on my life for the
last thirty years, I admit I made some extremely poor decisions, driven by
my curiosity, the desire to learn about technology, and a good intellectual
challenge. I'm a changed person now. I'm turning my talents and the
extensive knowledge I've gathered about information security and social
engineering tactics to helping government, businesses and individuals
prevent, detect, and respond to information security threats. This book is
one more way that I can use my experience to help others avoid the efforts
of the malicious information thieves of the world. I think you will find the
stories
enjoyable, eye-opening and educational.
--Kevin Mitnick
Knjiga, SLOBODA!
