Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick's Biography
There is no one like Kevin.
Once one of the FBI's Most Wanted because he
hacked into 40 major corporations just for
the challenge, Kevin is now a trusted security
consultant to the Fortune 500 and
governments worldwide.
Kevin and the Global Ghost Team™ now
maintain a 100 percent successful track
record of being able to penetrate the security
of any system they are paid to hack into
using a combination of technical exploits and
social engineering. As CEO and chief "white
hat" hacker at one of the most advanced
boutique security firms in the world, Kevin
mentors leaders, executives, and staff on
both the theory and practice of social
engineering, topics on which he is the leading
global authority. Kevin also helps consumers—
from students to retirees— learn how to
protect their information and themselves
from harm, using understandable terms and
a friendly approach.
Kevin's insights on current events are highly
sought, leading to hundreds of media
appearances. He is the world's top
cybersecurity speaker , and has been a
commentator, security analyst, or interview
subject on CNN, CNBC, Al Jazeera, FOX News,
CBC, BBC, Radio Moscow, Tech TV, National
Public Radio, Playboy , Good Morning America ,
and 60 Minutes—to name just a few. He has
been called before Congress (both the House
and the Senate) to testify on security matters
affecting the United States. Kevin also works
in partnership with KnowBe4 to produce
critically acclaimed security awareness
training programs to counteract social
engineering and to improve security
effectiveness.
Kevin's books include Art of Intrusion: The
Real Story Behind the Exploits of Hackers,
Intruders and Deceivers and Art of
Deception: Controlling the Human Element of
Security, which are mandatory readings for
security professionals. His autobiography,
G host in the Wires: My Adventures as the
World's Most Wanted Hacker, a New York
Times best seller, is now available in fifteen
languages. 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
Los Angeles 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.
Mitnick soon fell in with an informal phone
phreak gang that met irregularly in a pizza
parlor in Hollywood . 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 San Francisco-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.
The case was actually solved when a jilted
girlfriend of one of the gang went to the
police...
That break-in occurred over Memorial Day
weekend in 1981, when Kevin and two friends
decided to physically enter Pacific Bell '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, Captain Crunch , the phone numbers were
actually misrouted numbers that would ring at a
coffee shop pay phone in Van Nuys.
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.
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 Three Days of the Condor, he had adopted
Condor as his nom de guerre. In the film
Redford plays the role of a hunted CIA
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.
After he was released, he obtained the license
plate "X HACKER" for his Nissan...
His next arrest was in 1983 by campus police at
the University of Southern California , 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 ARPAnet .
This time he was discovered sitting at a computer
in a campus terminal room, breaking into a
Pentagon computer over the ARPAnet, and was
sentenced to six months at the California Youth
Authority's Karl Holton Training School, a
juvenile prison in Stockton , California. After he
was released, he obtained the license plate "X
HACKER" for his Nissan, 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
TRW credit reference computer; an arrest
warrant was issued, but it later vanished from
police records without explanation.
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
Thousand Oaks, California. He was convicted of
stealing software from the Santa Cruz
Operation, 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.
In 1987 and 1988, Kevin and a friend, Lenny
DiCicco, fought a pitched electronic battle
against scientists at Digital Equipment's Palo
Alto research laboratory. Mitnick had become
obsessed with obtaining a copy of Digital's VMS
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.
...he agreed to one year in prison and six
months in a counseling program for his computer
"addiction."
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 Internal Revenue
Service . 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.
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 Las Vegas 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 Susan Thunder who
had been part of Mitnick's phone phreak 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 San
Fernando Valley 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.
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.
In late 1992 someone called the California
Department of Motor Vehicles office in
Sacramento , 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.