In Memory of Kevin Mitnick, the Hacker Who Broke the FBI, NSA, and Silicon Valley

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Content:
Part 1: The Dark Genius's Wild Youth
Part 2: The Condor Learns to Fly
Part 3: "My Fortune Has Turned Its Back"
Part 4: The Strangest Reason to Hack the Military
Part 5: The Phantom Number and the Mysterious
Part 6: Cat and Mouse with the Feds
Part 7: The Ghost in the Dead Man's Mask
Part 8: The Underground Man Gone Wild


Part 1: The Dark Genius's Wild Youth

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On July 16, 2023, Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous and archetypal hackers in history, passed away at the age of 59. In the mid-90s, he was considered the most wanted hacker in the world, and for good reason: Mitnick famously hacked corporate and US government networks, bypassed most security systems, wiretapped FBI agents, and obtained tons of confidential information and bank card data, including the accounts of Silicon Valley executives — but he is believed to have never stolen money. And having closed his problems with American law, Kevin Mitnick became one of the best cybersecurity experts. Let's remember the man who largely formed the basis for the classic image of a 90s hacker.

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"Did you break it? Did you break it! But you didn't take the money."

Kevin Mitnick was born in Los Angeles in August 1963. It was a turbulent time for the United States: the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost turned into a nuclear catastrophe, had just died down. Less than six months later, President Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. To the sounds of rock and roll, the States were shaken by the psychedelic revolution and the fight for civil rights for the black population, Beatlemania, the hippie movement, and the Vietnam War were on the horizon, and Soviet spaceships with astronauts were honking overhead. And against this backdrop, computer technology was being developed in the United States, at first not very noticeably to the public, but more and more rapidly: both in Silicon Valley and beyond.

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Street on the outskirts of Los Angeles, 1963

Young Kevin's life was not particularly cheerful. His parents, Shelley Jaffe and Alan Mitnick, divorced when he was three. However, his father continued to be involved in Kevin's life, but mostly remotely during the first decade. Shelley, half-Armenian, worked as a simple waitress in the diners of the San Fernando Valley: no two-story houses with a lawn from sitcoms, just work from morning until night. They lived in the northern suburbs of Los Angeles on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. The nerd boy with big teeth was lonely and unpopular at schools, which he often changed following his mother's new jobs, but he was very fond of technology. An important feature distinguished him from the "typical nerd": Kevin had a hard time with his peers, but he was not shy and was great at finding a common language with adults, convincing them to do what he needed. He also really liked breaking systems in every sense of the word.

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Young Kevin with his mother, early 70s

At the age of one and a half, Kevin managed to get out of his crib and open the front door, as if hinting at his future profile. Kevin's very attractive mother had already changed three official and several common-law husbands in his memory. Alas, they had a hard time finding a common language with the boy, Kevin was mostly annoyed by them, and one even tried to harass him. At the first sign of problems with her son, Shelley threw another man out of the house with his things - and Kevin himself later suggested in his memoirs that the difficulties with his mother's partners also contributed to the formation of his desire to give a damn about authorities and hack the systems of all sorts of high-status dudes.

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He also got it from the FBI agents, whom Mitnick literally wiretapped himself.

Kevin's first thoughts about how systems can be broken and how people can be easily deceived came when he was ten. He met a girl his age and even found mutual interest, but they had not yet reached the point of romance. But the girl had a magician father, and Kevin was glued to his sleight of hand for a long time.

Another source of inspiration was a school bus driver who told Kevin about the possibility of hacking police radio frequencies and making free phone calls via special frequencies and telephone network systems. Inspired by the prospects, Kevin spent several months taking evening courses in amateur radio and was officially certified at the age of 12.

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Kevin with his mother in a mock prison for a photo op: in 2016 he posted this photo with the comment "If only I knew ;-)"

The adventures of the future hacker in social engineering and system hacking in the broad sense of the word began at the age of 12. Kevin was always short of pocket money, but he loved to ride the streets of the endless Los Angeles on the bus. A ticket cost 25 cents, a transfer cost another 10. And Kevin loved to ride often. He found out from one of the drivers where they sold punches for composting tickets, begged his mother for 15 dollars to buy one, and then dug up unused tickets in the trash at the bus station. After that, he began to travel around Los Angeles and the surrounding areas even more, and spent the pocket money he saved on immoderate consumption of burgers (because of which he lost his athletic shape and slightly increased in circumference).

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Los Angeles, 1975 - these are the streets Kevin loved riding the bus on so much that he started counterfeiting tickets

Kevin also discovered his talents for social mimicry and acting. During his Bar Mitzvah ceremony on turning 13, he imitated a rabbi so accurately and in such detail - thinking that this was the norm - that his parents considered it indecent banter. The ability to get into character no worse than the bald guy from Brazzers from Hitman, carefully developed, will help him many times both in hacking systems using the "human factor" and in playing hide-and-seek with the entire FBI machine on his tail.

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In his dangerous business, Kevin Mitnick acted not only as a brilliant hacker, but also as a follower of Ostap Bender

In high school, he befriended fellow radio hacker Steven Shalita. Together, they immersed themselves in the fascinating world of tapping into other people's frequencies to gather information and pull pranks. By tapping police waves and phone companies, they learned the internal procedures and habits of employees so they could sound and communicate like "their own." Kevin soon learned to extract almost any information he needed from the phone company's internal networks, including the personal numbers of Hollywood celebrities: this was called phreaking, and was a popular pastime among not-so-law-abiding American geeks in the 1970s.

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In high school, Kevin became fascinated with phones and walkie-talkies, and people around him became a bit uneasy about it.

Along the way, he played a trick on several enemies, causing them to be charged 10 cents for every call they made: the system thought they were calling from a pay phone. Then Kevin got to computer science classes, and the abyss swallowed him up in an instant. He realized that compared to computers and computer networks, telephone systems were a thing of the past. Naturally, Kevin had absolutely no time for studying: neither for studying a new field for him, nor for computer games.

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Young Geeks and Early Computer Games

Naturally, Kevin didn't leave it at that and very soon got the hang of breaking primitive passwords on the school computer for unlimited access. The teacher, Mr. Crisp, tried to replace the usual passwords with a punch card reader - but he didn't take into account that he carried these punch cards in his shirt pocket, where the sequence of holes was easy to read by eye. Worse, Kevin managed to get to the network that connected the school machines with the computers of the University of Southern California, and also put to shame all attempts to block access to them. Well, and then decided not to trifle, he went directly to the dean of the computer science department of the California Institute of Technology, Wes Hampton - and begged him to give him, as a young talent, access to their machines, more powerful and advanced.

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If Dean Hampton knew who he was letting into the "garden"...

Kevin Mitnick began studying BASIC and Fortran and after a few weeks wrote a phishing program to steal passwords from students at the institute. This was soon discovered, but the lab assistant who noticed it was rather touched by the student's talents and even helped him debug the code. Kevin did not commit any malicious acts: he simply wildly enjoyed having access to the widest possible range of information, especially if it was classified.

However, the password hacks were then discovered by another lab assistant. The matter ended with three campus security officers storming into the classroom where Kevin was working, restraining him, handcuffing him, and not letting him leave the station until his mother picked him up. Naturally, he was banned from the institute's cars, but there were no legal consequences: US laws were just beginning to recognize such things as criminal. Kevin was told about it all the time, but it only made him more excited.

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The character of Hackerman is largely based on a young Kevin Mitnick.

Then there was admission to Pierce College in Los Angeles... from where Kevin was soon expelled for hacking everything and everyone with the wording "we have nothing to teach him, he already knows everything." At this time, Mitnick did not stop improving both the art of penetrating telephone networks and the art of hacking computer networks. His passion for the latter played a cruel joke on him. He got in touch with a group of hackers who decided to use the 16-year-old talent in the dark. In 1979, they instructed him to hack into the networks of Digital Equipment Corporation, supposedly to "test his skills" - from where they were actually going to steal the code for one of the newest programs. Mitnick did not hack the network directly, but simply convinced the chief system administrator that he was one of the developers who had screwed up the password. The system administrator was so kind that he gave Kevin everything, including the status of a privileged user. The "friends" stole everything they wanted, disappeared into the sunset, and turned the performer over to Digital Equipment Corporation.

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Happens!

At that time, no criminal case was opened against Kevin – the legal basis was still very weak. However, already in December 1980, he managed to attract the attention of the FBI: together with his friend Misha Gershman, they hacked the database of a company that systematized the pedigrees of racehorses. They noticed the hack and informed the FBI. To Kevin’s horror and his mother’s amazement, an agency employee came to him – but for now he only gave him a pedagogical talk.

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As you might guess, it didn't help: Kevin immediately contacted another team of hackers, with whom he began to hack even more ferociously and brazenly. Later, he recalled that he repeatedly promised himself and his worried mother to quit phreaking and hacking, especially when it became fraught with prison, but he could no more fulfill these promises than a seasoned alcoholic could quit drinking. British psychiatrist Roy Escapa, who later observed Kevin Mitnick in prison, officially stated that he really could not help but hack systems due to a serious compulsive mental disorder... Well, Kevin helped him hack the international communication system and call England from the USA for free.

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Anonymous Hackers Club

Kevin was framed at his new company, too: in 1981, after stealing lists of internal numbers and technical manuals from the Pacific Telephone building, his hacker colleague Lewis couldn't think of anything cleverer than to brag about this epic achievement to his ex-girlfriend, a hacker named Susan. They had recently broken up in a scandal because Lewis had cheated on them - and who had already tried to frame the impostor along with his friends by hacking into US Teasing's computer system, erasing files and printing the text "MITNIK WAS HERE DAMN YOU" on all printers.

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Hacker, don't call your ex when you're drunk, especially if they're also hackers!

Naturally, Susan leaked everything to the cops. Soon Kevin was intercepted in a standard Ford Crown Victoria, which didn't even have the word "cops" written on it at the time, pulled over to the side of the road with a siren on the roof blaring, and three guns pointed at him. After that, they roughly laid him face down on the ground, handcuffed him, and started shouting about Kevin having a "logic bomb" in the trunk. Apparently, this was Susan's crazy joke, which the cops took too literally.

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Kevin Mitnick arrested

Kevin ended up in the California Youth Authority (CYA) in Norwalk, where they kept juvenile offenders in almost full-fledged prison conditions and wondered what to do with them next. In Norwalk, in the company of aspiring South Central gangsters and other wonderful people, Kevin Mitnick celebrated his 18th birthday in the summer of 1981.

Then he was released on probation, and everything would have been fine... But Kevin couldn't resist. Together with his hacker friend Lenny DiCicco, they dug into the network from the lab of the long-suffering University of Southern California: Kevin still couldn't afford a normal machine and used the university's. And they quietly hacked all the networks and passwords they could get their hands on.

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Kevin Mitnick just couldn't help but break networks.

The connection was slow, and his hacker friends were pissed off. But one of the university buildings had a cluster of DEC TOP-20 mainframes connected to the ARPAnet… Anyway, in December 1982, armed police stormed the classroom where Kevin and Lenny were sitting again. As it turned out, they managed to hack into not only the accounts of university employees, but also at least one of the accounts of high-ranking Pentagon employees via ARPAnet. The police leaked the case of the young hacker to the press, and journalists got carried away, as usual, and to this day there are articles circulating on the Internet claiming that Kevin hacked into nothing less than the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in retaliation for his first stint in prison.

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Yes, yes, this very command center in case of a nuclear war in a deep underground bunker. Kevin Mitnick himself denies this

Kevin was sentenced to three years in prison, released on parole after six months, but was kept in suspense for a long time with periodic arrests. Apparently, law enforcement officers were already beginning to understand who they were dealing with.

Naturally, after getting out, Kevin Mitnick couldn't quit, although he tried. And almost the first thing he did was hack no less than the US National Security Agency - which, in fact, was supposed to be on guard of national cybersecurity.

… But we will look at the further adventures of Kevin Mitnick, the blossoming of his career and the crazy cat and mouse with the FBI in the status of the most wanted cybercriminal on the planet in the second part. Stay with us!


Part 2: The Condor Learns to Fly

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In the previous part, we left Kevin Mitnick at the stage of his first "trip": he managed to get out on parole, but the state police and the feds already realized who they were dealing with and began to keep an eye on "Condor". Mitnick took this nickname as a teenager - after watching the spy thriller "Three Days of the Condor", where a CIA analyst with the same call sign found himself a target for hunting by his colleagues. Despite the attention from the "authorities", Kevin Mitnick literally could not resist hacking everything and everyone - and the dangerous game continued with increasing stakes.

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Having escaped to freedom, Kevin first of all got into the frequencies of local radio amateurs. And he quickly quarreled with someone there, so quickly that the latter reported to the police about another hack of a private company's networks. Mitnick and his mother were called to the probation officer to "clarify some issues": since he initially got into trouble at the age of 19, for the American Themis he remained a juvenile offender. However, in the office he was tied up, handcuffed and taken to the detention center in Van Nuys.

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The Van Nuys detention center where Kevin Mitnick spent time in the early 1980s

Luckily for Mitnick, just a week before the events described, his uncle Mitchell had been there - creatively squandering his billion-dollar fortune, made in the real estate market, on cocaine and other substances. Kevin helped his uncle by reconfiguring one of the pay phones in the detention center in such a way that you could call anywhere from it and talk for as long as you wanted, and the call would be recorded on the police account. Well, who else?

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Officer Tenpenny would be very unhappy with suspect Mitnick.

Now Mitnick himself found himself in this detention center - and due to the rather free regime on the territory, he managed to contact many people during the first night. In particular, thanks to this, he managed to escape from one of the most dangerous places in the California penitentiary system - the Los Angeles County Detention Center. It is not entirely clear why, but soon Kevin was sent to the very place where suspects from street gangs and other equally dangerous characters, familiar to the Russian gamer mainly from the GTA series, were kept in large numbers. The fat geek in glasses was thrown into a common cell with comrades of the creepiest appearance and behavior, and only the timely intervention of his parole supervisor allowed Mitnick to get out to more decent places the next morning.

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"Everyone knows what they can do in prison"

So, Kevin served his 60 days and was free again. Where did he go first? You'll never guess: to the police academy! Where... no, he didn't apply for admission, as you might expect from a detective comedy, but bought a colorfully illustrated annual magazine of the Los Angeles Police Department. In its photographs - oh, the naive 80s! - the white teeth of employees, including those working in civilian clothes and undercover, were flashing. It's no surprise that our hero studied the photo portraits and lists of personnel of the department with great care, with whom he planned to intersect as little as possible in the future.

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After his release, Kevin got a job as a computer programmer at a company owned by one of his mother's friends. As expected, he got bored there very quickly, found another like-minded person and again went on a rampage in the field of hacking and phone phreaking. However, big brother was already watching - and soon Kevin, going out for lunch with a female colleague, noticed a suspicious group of fit men near the office, whose faces were familiar to him. Not only from the LAPD yearbook, but also from personal experience: a couple of years ago, one of the law enforcement officers had already laid him face down on the ground, and then diligently searched the trunk for a "logic bomb".

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Instead of running away and getting caught, Kevin put his arm around his colleague and asked her to play along, whispering that he had spotted an unpleasant acquaintance and didn't want to be seen (which was basically the truth). They got into the car together, Mitnick ducked down and asked to be driven to a pay phone a couple of blocks away. I don't know what his colleague thought, but soon Kevin was dialing one of the Los Angeles police departments:

This is Detective Shaffer. I need to check on a subject. I'm interested in any and all data: regional episodes and the FBI's National Crime Information Center. I'm interested in Mitnick, M-I-T-N-I-K, Kevin David. DOB: June 8, 1963.

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Having learned that he was being charged with a parole violation again (and most likely deservedly so), Kevin went into hiding at his grandmother's house. Having studied the laws, Kevin found out that if he kept quiet for another four months until February 1985, the arrest warrant would expire and he would be formally cleared before the law. With this in mind, he made a deal with his grandmother's friend, whose parents had a house north of San Francisco, jumped on a Greyhound under the name Michael Phelps and was gone. Helping to throw the cops off the scent was the fact that a rumor had been spread in the hacker community about "Condor" escaping to Israel.

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In the village of Californian pensioners, pastoral and grace reigned, but Kevin suffered: there was not a single computer anywhere, and even the radio was hard to find. It was also not recommended to get behind the wheel of a car - Kevin had a license in his real name, under which he was wanted. He had to ride around the neighborhood on a bicycle and at the same time lose weight. But even here Mitnick found something to do: he signed up for a course on criminal law, where he listened very carefully to the mistakes that the police and the FBI most often "catch" criminals.

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"Very interesting, continue, I'm writing it down"

In February 1985, Kevin was finally sadly informed that he was no longer wanted under a “dishonorable termination.” Our hero rushed back to Los Angeles, met his old friend Lenny di Cicco, and… they immediately went on another job. It was probably a case of compulsive disorder: Mitnick literally could not help but break systems if he had even the slightest opportunity. So one night, using Lenny’s romantic relationship, they broke into the Hughes office and hacked into the ARPAnet via a VAX computer.

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By 1985, ARPAnet already had thousands of nodes both in the United States and abroad - and as a defense network, it included highly sensitive and secret ones.

The first thing the two hackers did was to get into the Dockmaster computer system from the resources of none other than the National Security Center of the US NSA. No small talk, right? However, this was again largely a “social hack”: Lenny managed to impersonate an employee of the center and get the login data from one of the real employees of the US NSA Computer Security Center . They didn’t manage to find out anything particularly interesting, but both friends were delighted with the opportunity to poke their noses into the NSA’s coffers.

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And it’s no surprise: let me remind you that it is the NSA, not the FBI or the CIA, that is literally the “all-seeing eye” of the American government, monitoring everything and everyone.

However, Kevin did not give up hope for a legitimate career. The object of his dreams was to work as a programmer at General Telephone. But this required much greater knowledge and skills in the field of programming than the semi-self-taught Mitnick had. Therefore, having barely hacked the NSA for the first (but not the last) time, Kevin received a federal grant for training and became a student at the computer school "Computer Training Center" in Los Angeles. There he passionately fell in love with Assembler, realizing what broad opportunities with the proper knowledge and skills a low-level programming language provides. He liked high-level languages like COBOL less, but he diligently studied them too.

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In class, Mitnick hid his knowledge of hacking and pretended to be a lamer when it was brought up. Well, at night, for most of 1985-86, Kevin and Lenny enthusiastically hacked into telephone company systems, not neglecting their favorite social engineering. The main thing was to know who to introduce themselves as from within a large company in order to pass for one of their own, but hardly personally familiar, employees - to whom all passwords and logins would be leaked routinely and without a second thought:

Social engineering and technical attacks played a big role in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when appropriate and exploited technical vulnerabilities when appropriate.

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During this period, Kevin's main hobby was not so much hacking as phreaking, breaking into telephone networks.

By the end of 1986, Kevin and Lenny had taken over all of the Pacific Bell switches and the Utah and Nevada switches without the FBI noticing, but that wasn't the limit. The young talents had infiltrated the Chesapeak and Potomak Telephone Company, also known as C&P. It was already servicing no less than the US capital, Washington, including US government departments and the Pentagon. Thanks to this, Kevin was able to extend his metaphorical tentacles further, to the NSA, which had long been troubling him.

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"The National Security Agency: The Only Part of the U.S. Federal Government That Actually Listens to You"

Kevin's first move was to gain access to the switchboard of the Maryland phone company that served the NSA. He figured out what common prefixes the NSA phone numbers had, then used one of their test procedures to listen in on the calls. And voila! He was soon tapping into a conversation that was clearly between NSA employees. Little did they know they were being listened to by a 24-year-old hacker from Los Angeles.

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In his memoirs, Mitnick claims that, having achieved his goal and confirmed the awesomeness of his skills, he immediately stopped any further attempts to enter the holy of holies of the American Deep State. The times were tense and harsh, the Cold War was still going on, and he was not at all happy to repeat the sad fate of the character from Three Days of the Condor. On the other hand, Mitnick's entire biography literally screams that it would have been extremely difficult for him to refrain from THIS, regardless of the risks.

In any case, "according to the official version," Kevin only took a peek at the NSA and left immediately. And he even prudently wrote about that in his memoirs only after all the statutes of limitations had expired.

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Kevin Mitnick and his 2011 memoir, Ghost in the Net

However, Big Brother did not give up trying to catch the annoying hackers: the first entry into the database of the National Computer Security Center of the US NSA from the office of an airline (!) was difficult to remain unnoticed. The FBI came for Lenny, he honestly tried not to spill the beans and furiously denied everything, but he was still kicked out of the company.

After that, everything seemed to calm down. Soon, Mitnick found his first mutual love, finally received an invitation to the very company where he dreamed of working, and even convinced himself that hacking and phreaking were over… But if everything were that simple, we wouldn’t be talking about “the greatest of hackers” now, would we?

So, to be continued.


Part 3: "My Fortune Has Turned Its Back"

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In the last article, we left Kevin Mitnick at a time when everything seemed to be going well for him. He had sorted out his teenage problems with the law, had successfully poked his nose into the US National Security Agency twice, had finally received a grant for professional programming training, and had even become hooked on assembler. Kevin was already thinking about quitting hacking and phreaking — breaking into telephone networks, which had been his main hobby in his youth. But… If he had managed to quit then, we wouldn’t be writing a biography of the most famous hacker of the 90s, right?

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So, it's 1986. Kevin Mitnick is still studying at a computer school and learning programming languages. Naturally, his classmates in those years were mostly guys, but sometimes he met girls. Among them was a petite Italian named Bonnie Vitello, who our hero fell hard for. The problem was that Bonnie was beautiful and popular, and Kevin... Well, Kevin loved fast food since his teenage years - as a result, he became plumper and plumper with each passing year.

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Kevin with his mother in 1984: not very fat yet, but already bearded (before it became mainstream)

At first, Mitnick was sure that there was literally nothing to catch here - but courage and intelligence came to his aid here too. The first approach, however, was very geeky: Kevin tried to attract the attention of his passion by asking her not to terminate the execution of his high-priority programs on the work computer. And when he decided to directly express his interest, he received a polite refusal: it turned out that Bonnie was already engaged. Well, that's a challenge, Kevin decided!

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The northern outskirts of Los Angeles in the 80s - this is roughly where Kevin Mitnick lived

To begin with, Mitnick continued the conversation anyway — and after a while, he found out that Bonnie suspected her fiancé of not telling her everything about his finances and debts. Finding out other people's secrets? Ha! You found the very man who loves it, knows how to do it, and practices it. Kevin got into the TRW credit company system, and also found discarded reports on the credit history of potential buyers in the trash at the Ford dealership — with the access codes to the system kindly left behind. Whoosh, and very soon Mitnick had a complete credit history of his competitor for Bonnie's hand and heart. As expected, the comrade was deeply in debt, although he pretended to be a wealthy macho. The engagement was broken off, and Bonnie began to sympathize even more with her hacker friend.

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Literally a couple of weeks after breaking up with her fiancé, Kevin became her new boyfriend. The fact that Bonnie was six years older than Kevin was only to her advantage: she was more experienced and knew how to organize a relationship, while our hero was a real lame in a personal sense. Perhaps the couple of a fragile Italian beauty and a heavyset geek looked a little dubious by the standards of California in the 80s, obsessed with gorgeous female and male bodies, but for the first few months they were completely happy. They devoured tons of Thai cuisine, and in order not to make her boyfriend even fatter, Bonnie taught him to take long walks along the picturesque mountain trails of the San Gabriel Range.

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San Gabriel - Great Places to Lose Weight

Along the way, it turned out that Bonnie works at the very GTE company where Kevin Mitnick literally dreamed of getting a job - and for this he was ready to reluctantly quit hacking and phreaking. True, he clearly lacked self-control. For example, he deliberately stayed late at the computer school to hack the school network and ensure himself administrator rights in it. He was caught in this exciting activity by a system administrator named Ariel. But instead of a scandal and expulsion with shame, he suddenly offered Kevin ... to improve the network security system, and even count it as a diploma work. Mitnick happily agreed - and received a diploma with honors.

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In his memoirs, Mitnick recalled this moment:
Graduates of the school were usually offered jobs by large companies. One of such companies was GTE, where Bonnie worked and I hacked systems. Wasn't it a miracle? I passed the interview with specialists from the IT department, then withstood another conversation with three HR people with dignity. After all, I was offered a job as a programmer. Dreams really do come true sometimes! No more hacking: I simply won't need it anymore. I will be paid for what I love to do, and exactly where I want to do it!

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It seemed that life was going well, and Kevin had a stable future as a law-abiding corporate programmer.

Mitnick worked at GTE for a long time. Nine whole days. Then the security service came for him, accompanied by the same manager who had conducted the interview. Kevin was told he was fired, thoroughly searched, his disks were checked to make sure there were no corporate secrets or codes on them, and he was escorted with his things to his car in the parking lot. As Kevin found out later, GTE's security service had acquaintances in the security service of the Pacific Bell company he had hacked, who began to laugh like hell at their colleagues about the fact that their management had personally introduced a well-known and dangerous hacker into the ranks of the corporation.

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This is roughly what Kevin Mitnick looked like from the point of view of US information corporation security in the 80s

Kevin didn't give up here either: he was honestly going to quit hacking and get an official job. An attempt to become an information security specialist at Security Pacific bank followed. Kevin's skills impressed the company, and he was offered a very solid salary of $34,000. However, there were reinsurers in the security service who dug into our hero's hacker background. The company asked if Kevin owned the amateur radio call sign WA6VPS and whether he had a bad habit of digging through trash bins near offices... after which they rejected his employment simply "just in case."

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All these were strong blows for Kevin, which were smoothed out only by a wonderful relationship with Bonnie. The two boots turned out to be a pair, moved in together and literally lived in perfect harmony, munching peanut butter, walking through the surrounding hills and picturesquely cluttering the apartment: both were too lazy to clean, and "it was fine as is." However, Kevin, plunging into gloom from failures with employment, gradually began to cheat on Bonnie - naturally, not with other girls, but with his favorite illegal pastimes and still best friend Lenny di Cicco. He also got a job at the University of Southern California for advanced training, but instead of studying, he spent hours sitting with Lenny and enthusiastically hacking.

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Then Kevin's painful addiction to hacking systems took hold of him again, to the point that he would increasingly hang out at the computer at home while Bonnie watched TV or read. Kevin's partial justification could be that he finally got a part-time job at Fromin's Delicatessen, where he helped improve electronic accounting mechanisms... And along the way, he tried to hack into the systems of the Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) telephone company. They were working on improving a version of Unix, Xenix, specially optimized for the functionality of telephone companies - and our hero couldn't wait to fully understand this thing already at the development stage in order to subsequently hack everything and everyone.

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Using his usual methods of social engineering, Kevin found out the login and password for accessing the SCO network through Pacific Bell (mwa-ha-ha), after which he dug into it in search of the source code for their version of Xenix. The local system administrator was so kind that, having found Kevin in the system, he himself said that he could see him because “that’s the job” — and even created his own account with the nickname “Hacker” for him. Kevin, diligently feigning the idle interest of an amateur, did find the source code of the system, but it turned out to be too heavy for his modem. At least, that’s what Kevin himself later assured.

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And everything would be fine, but soon Bonnie returned home to find the apartment turned upside down. The first thought was that thieves had broken in. However, it then turned out that the dollar bills from Kevin's stash were carefully laid out on the table. Next to them lay an official search warrant from the police department investigating computer crimes. But Kevin's computer was no longer in the apartment, as were all of his disks. This was a disaster. Even worse, the police came to Bonnie's work - to question her about the penetration of the SCO company database from her apartment.

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Kevin was in a panic. In addition to the next problems for his own bottom, he was extremely worried about the fact that he had literally set up his girlfriend (we will leave the question of what he was thinking when he went online with her IP off-screen), and he was sure that after that she would definitely leave him. He also caused problems for his mother and grandmother, who had to spend a lot of time looking for a lawyer. At that time, Kevin was sitting in a hotel with Bonnie, and they were either crying on each other's shoulders or breaking the bed in an attempt to distract themselves. To Kevin's surprise, Bonnie did not accuse him of incredible idiocy and irresponsibility, but said that they needed to go through this together. In his memoirs, Mitnick honestly admits that Bonnie loved him, and he behaved like an asshole.

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After speaking with lawyers, Bonnie and Cla... sorry, Kevin turned themselves in to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office in West Hollywood and confessed. Aunt Chickie posted $5,000 bail. Over the next few months of 1987, the couple spent most of their time with lawyers, went to court multiple times, spent all of their savings, and were forced to borrow heavily from Kevin's relatives.

In these unhappy circumstances, they got married, not so much for romantic reasons as for legal ones. As spouses, Bonnie and Kevin had the right not to testify against each other in court, and Bonnie could also visit Kevin in prison, where he was likely to end up.

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Kevin Mitnick and Bonnie Vitello's wedding party, June 1987

In addition to the criminal charges, SCO sued Kevin and Bonnie for $1.4 million each for “damages.” However, the company agreed to drop these lawsuits if Kevin would tell how he had managed to get into their system so ingeniously. During an official interview with the company’s system administrator, Mitnick honestly admitted that he had not hacked anything as a hacker, but had used social engineering methods and, under a convincing pretext, had gotten the login and password from a Pacific Bell employee.

Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls and secure access devices, and they are wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, and manage computer systems.

In the end, it was limited to two years of probation and a fine of $216 for Kevin and a complete dismissal of the charges against Bonnie. Kevin also had to officially promise not to commit any more offenses.

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But unlike the computer, Kevin's disks were not returned, and they were enough evidence for new charges. The cops sent the disks to Pacific Bell's security service. They were extremely impressed by the contents, but they did not charge Mitnick with anything and only sent an instructive letter to their offices listing his adventures and which of his employees had screwed up and how. Kevin managed to get hold of the text of the letter, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end: if the corporation's management wanted, he should have been dealt with not by the regular Santa Cruz County cops, but by the FBI.

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Below we will quote from the memoirs what exactly was found on Kevin's disks
• a transcript of information illegally obtained by me from all Southern California Switching Center (SCC) and Electronic Systems Maintenance Center (ESAC) computers; the file lists the names, logins, passwords, and home phone numbers of employees who work in the ESACs from all over Southern and Northern California;
• dial-up numbers and identification documents for switching center communication channels and PC synchronization cables;
• commands for testing and seizing lines, automatic trunk testing channels;
• commands and logins for Northern and Southern California Switching Centers;
• commands for monitoring lines and seizing the dial tone, which is a long dial tone;
• mentions of posing as Southern California security agents and ESAC employees in order to obtain information;
• commands to interrupt outgoing and incoming calls;
• Pacific Bell complex addresses and electronic lock codes for the following Southern California headquarters: ELSG12, LSAN06, LSAN12, LSAN15, LSAN56, AVLN11, HLWD01, HWTH01, IGWD01, LOMT11, and SNPD01;
• Corporate e-mail communications outlining new login and password procedures and security measures;
• A breakdown table of a UNIX encryption reader hacker program file; if successfully decrypted, this tool can crack any UNIX program.

Over the next year, Kevin held on as best he could. He officially took a job at Franmark; Bonnie continued working at GTE, although she suspected that she was under very close security scrutiny. The couple began saving for their own home and, to save money, moved in with Kevin's mother - with obvious consequences for family life in the near-constant presence of a hyperactive mother-in-law.

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To cope with the stress, Kevin… no, he didn’t propose moving out again, or exercise, or see a therapist, or take antidepressants. He got close to Lenny again, and the hacker buddies couldn’t think of anything better to do than hack into systems again. This time, at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Kevin and Lenny enrolled in the computer lab at Pierce College and the first thing they did was hack into a terminal there, trying to copy the Micro VAX virtual memory system. However, it could only be copied to a magnetic tape reel, the process took several hours, and Kevin was warned in time that Professor Schlippenbach had noticed the outrage and wanted to ambush the intruders.

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In the end, Kevin and Lenny didn't go to pick up the reel, but they still came under suspicion - reputation, you know. After that, the friends discovered that a real hunt had begun for them. The cops literally followed them home in the evenings, and sometimes they were even found on the roofs of college buildings, spying through binoculars on what a couple of hackers were doing there.

Later, Kevin, through the same social engineering, managed to find out that while they were trying to hack into DEC's systems, the corporation's security service was already working with the police to catch them hacking. DEC even planted an employee in the college, who was monitoring Kevin and Lenny through the computer systems from a specially designated room.

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Even Kevin and Lenny's personal accounts and directories in the college system were under the control of DEC programmers. And here Kevin couldn't resist a joke. He wrote a simple script that listed the files in his directory over and over again. Since all actions in the suspects' directories were recorded with output to the printer, the poor agent soon found himself literally buried in paper from a continuously running printer. Technically, this was not a violation (Kevin and Lenny tried very hard to not get caught in any way from the moment they were discovered being followed), but they were still expelled from college based on the totality of evidence and suspicions.

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In fact, this was the beginning of Kevin's future habit of mocking the agents who were following him.

It seemed like everything was screaming at Kevin to stop. In California, he was known as a hacker by seemingly everyone, including the cleaning ladies and the doughnut vendors. Did he stop? Of course not — in fact, he went on a rampage, eventually attracting the attention of not just the county or state police, but the FBI itself.

But more about that in the next part.


Part 4: The Strangest Reason to Hack the Military

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In the previous article, we told you about Kevin Mitnick’s failed attempts to become a law-abiding citizen, a corporate IT specialist, and even a good husband. The sins of his youth and the fame of a dangerous hacker followed him literally on his heels — and then detectives joined the pursuers. And our hero was bad at dealing with stress without hacking something and breaking into someone’s networks just for fun. Kevin and his best friend Lenny couldn’t resist trolling the agents watching them even under total control — and as a result, they were kicked out of college. Naturally, they didn’t stop there, which led to some very serious consequences.

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In the 1980s, Digital Equipment Corporation was one of the largest manufacturers of mini-computers in the world, and their products were of great interest in the USSR

The main reason for Kevin and Lenny dropping out of college was their keen interest in the software of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The interest was mutual: while the hacker friends were trying to get the code of their VMS operating system along with the developers' internal data on security systems, DEC agents were following them along with the police and trying to catch them red-handed. It was Kevin and Lenny's joke about a corporation employee who was secretly monitoring their educational accounts that became the last straw - after the poor guy was literally buried under paper from the printer, which began to print a report on literally every action of the friends, they were asked to leave college as far away as possible.

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Left without studying, Kevin and Lenny devoted all their time to getting the coveted code and shaming DEC and the police. By means of “social engineering” and phone phreaking, they already habitually pretended to be a call from a company employee from an internal corporate number - and received logins and passwords with the necessary access from yet another noob in digital security. After which they discreetly changed one of the passwords - which was done quite easily in those days - and soon they were enthusiastically digging through a directory with the delightfully inconspicuous name VMS_SOURCE. Oh, the innocent 80s!

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In the 1980s, Digital Equipment Corporation nearly knocked IBM off the boat of modernity with its rapid advances in mini- and personal computers, but digital security was poor for just about everyone in those days.

Then our heroes wrote a "small tool" to bypass security verification systems - and hacked a couple more accounts with unlimited rights from among those that had not been used for more than six months. Thanks to them, they got into the mail of developers, including one of the creators of the VMS operating system Andy Goldstein, and found there letters from the British enthusiastic programmer Neil Clift from the University of Leeds, who was excellent at finding vulnerabilities in the system and helped Andy fix them. In the correspondence, Kevin and Lenny also found an analysis of the work of the harsh German hacker group Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which had previously managed to tweak the login system for the VMS operating system to make the user invisible - while simultaneously disabling security settings for him.

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The history of the German hacker club "Chaos", also known by the abbreviation CCC, is a separate and very interesting topic, and the life of one of its founders, Karl Koch, formed the basis of the film "23"

Kevin contacted German hackers - who, as it turned out, were already aware of his identity - and together they began to improve their VMS hacking skills. Lenny, being less known to the police and corporations, managed to get a job at a company that actively used DEC computers running the VMS operating system - which allowed Mitnick and di Cicco to patch the hacking system literally immediately after each update. When DEC programmers created a sniffer program to detect unauthorized access to the system, it was broken literally immediately after its release.

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Then Kevin and Lenny took on the Easynet computer network, which DEC was building for its computers as an alternative to the developing Internet. They planned to pump out large amounts of operating system source code data from it, but everything ran into the problem of a lack of servers to store it. Having come up with nothing better, the friends found nodes that connected Easynet to ARPAnet, which remained largely an American military network in case of a nuclear war. And these nodes were located mainly at American military facilities. And really, where else could two young talents store stolen data if not on secret military servers?

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The first suitable node was found… at the US Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, which covers the approaches to the country's capital, Washington, and the largest naval base in Baltimore from the Atlantic Ocean. Soon, the space on their servers was completely filled with Kevin and Lenny's archived data, disguised as digital garbage. Then they got into the servers of the all-important National Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

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Naval Air Station Patuxent River, which Kevin and Lenny hacked simply because they ran out of disk space

However, the computer scientists at the California research center were smarter than those at the naval air base. They managed to record the unauthorized modification of the files, performed reverse engineering by deciphering the structure of the binary files, and determined that the code used for the cracking was written by German hackers from the Chaos Club. Since some members of the West German hacker community, including one of the founders of the CCC, also collaborated with the KGB of the USSR, there was a considerable uproar in the American press in the genre of "German communist hackers are breaking into our secret servers!"

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Fortunately, Kevin and Lenny were not noticed at the time. They hacked several less advanced military facilities that had Easynet connection points with ARPAnet and began to download gigabytes of source code for the VMS operating system version 5. Naturally, such huge amounts of traffic did not escape the attention of DEC system administrators, and they spent many sleepless nights trying to stop what was happening, blocking accounts and changing passwords. But by this time, Kevin and Lenny had such tight control over their entire system that they literally knew about all the “enemy’s” moves in real time — and took all measures to continue downloading everything they wanted.

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And then one fine day, all the source code was downloaded. Now it needed to be transferred to magnetic tapes. The process was launched using good old social engineering - after which the number of tapes with the VMS source code in the stashes of hacker friends began to go into the tens. And everything would have been fine, but in the process, Kevin and Lenny began to compete in hacking computer networks, each time betting $ 150. It quickly became clear that Kevin was constantly winning one-sidedly. Lenny was getting more and more annoyed with this each time, but he refused to stop the competition on principle.

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After some time, Lenny offered Kevin to hack the electronic lock to the office with computers - with a stake of the same $150. Kevin simply found the code in his wallet, Lenny, as usual, lost his temper - and when Kevin demanded his hundred and fifty bucks, he replied that he did not have any money at the moment. With approximately the same excuses, he continued to "freeze" his colleague for quite a long time. Then the indignant Kevin could not think of anything better than to call his employer company on behalf of the bailiff and announce the court decision to block Lenny's accounts. After which, as you might guess, he finally went beyond the orbit of Pluto on aphedron thrust.

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(approximately here)

Soon, one night, Lenny invited Kevin to work from his office: he was trying to hack the account of Neil Clift, the same enthusiastic programmer who helped DEC improve the security of the operating system. Several days passed. Lenny called him again - supposedly, he finally received the money and he could pay. When Kevin arrived at the agreed place in the underground parking lot, he saw that his friend was grinning strangely, and when he finally got out of the car, FBI agents flew out from everywhere and laid Mitnick on the hood. A few hours later, he was taken to a federal prison on an island with the grim name of Terminal Island. Well, Lenny did not even fulfill Kevin's last request - to call his mother and tell him that he was detained by the FBI.

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As it turned out, after the story with the lock, Lenny, completely mad with anger, told his superiors about what happened, and they informed the DEC and the FBI. On that last night of the hack, the computers in Lenny's office were already under the full control of the Bureau's agents, and Lenny himself was wiretapped to collect evidence. From the island prison, Kevin was taken to the FBI's Los Angeles office, and then to court - where he was presented with a whole train of charges.

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Among them were:
  • hacking into the US National Security Agency system and obtaining classified access codes;
  • disconnecting the telephone connection of a former probation officer;
  • fabricating a judge's credit report after Kevin didn't like his attitude;
  • planting a fake story in the media that the national bank Security Pacific lost millions of dollars after Kevin was denied employment;
  • repeated malicious use and disconnection of actress Kristy McNichol's phone;
  • hacking into the police department's computers and deleting information about Kevin's previous arrests.

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As the assistant prosecutor read out the list, Kevin's eyes widened and his ass grew hotter. He had indeed hacked and stolen a lot of data, but on these particular counts he was completely innocent! At least, that's what Mitnick claimed until his dying day. For example, all he had stolen from the NSA was an unclassified list of the agency's phone codes, which was publicly available on the ARPAnet in a file called NSA.TXT. It wasn't Kevin who had planted the fake about the bank. And he had no connection or interest in the actress Christy McNichol - and she herself later denied any problems with the phone.

However, all this did not help. American Themis turned out to be extremely unfair to Kevin, and he finally lost faith in it. What this led to - we will tell in the next part.


Part 5: The Phantom Number and the Mysterious

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So, Kevin Mitnick, due to the betrayal of his friend Lenny di Cicco, who inopportunely bombed from a lost bet, fell into the clutches of the FBI. In court, he was charged with various actions that he, at least as Mitnick claimed before his death, did not commit. However, many of his real crimes remained unknown at the time. At this point, in front of a prosecutor who spoke of his non-existent crimes, including the phrase "He can whistle into the phone and launch a nuclear missile from the NORAD base!", Kevin began to doubt the American justice system. As a result, he decided to do everything possible to never get caught. However, abiding by the law and giving up hacking were not part of his plans...

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The Los Angeles Courthouse next to City Hall

The capture and trial of Kevin Mitnick was hailed in the American press as a landmark victory for justice against one of the most dangerous hackers, who could break into virtually any system using a computer and a regular telephone. Time magazine ran an article in January 1989 that said: “Even the most dangerous criminals are usually allowed to use the telephone, but Kevin Mitnick is not. At least not without a guard watching. And he is only allowed to call his wife, mother and lawyer. Giving Mitnick a telephone is like giving a gun to a criminal. The 25-year-old former college student is accused by federal authorities of using telephone lines to become one of the most dangerous computer hackers of all time.”

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In the public eye, Mitnick already seemed like a sinister superhacker in 1989, capable of starting a nuclear war just for fun.

Mitnick was both flattered and outraged by such assessments. At the judge’s request, he was in a solitary confinement cell measuring 3 by 2.5 meters, and once again in his young life he sadly looked out the narrow window at the center of Los Angeles, which was seething with life, but so inaccessible. Later, he would describe this oppressive existence as spending many days in a cell for 23 hours a day with a dim light bulb. He was taken out of the cell only to take a shower and take a short walk in a small courtyard-well. Mitnick’s rare meetings with relatives, the radio and books he was allowed, as well as… mountains of high-calorie and sweet food that he ordered from the prison store as an anti-stress, helped him stay sane. As a result, during his time in the cell with minimal physical activity, he gained weight up to 109 kg.

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Living conditions in solitary confinement looked something like this

Kevin could only make calls from a payphone, to a strictly limited list of numbers for relatives and a lawyer, under the supervision of a security guard. He could only call his wife Bonnie outside of working hours. In a combination of longing for his beloved wife, a desire to show the system his independence, and spite, Mitnick learned to call Bonnie at work under the guise of calling her mother. To do this, he would dial the number on a payphone blindly, pretending to scratch his back, and then discreetly hang up, holding the receiver tightly to his ear so that the guard would not hear the beeps.

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American prison payphone

After two weeks of such calls, Kevin Mitnick was visited in his cell by surprised men in civilian clothes. They took him into the interrogation room and began asking him how he was able to make unauthorized calls right in front of the guard. Kevin denied everything, but the phone connections from the prison payphone were easily tracked. Eventually, he was given a personal phone, but with one caveat: the device itself was outside the cell, the guard dialed the number, and only the receiver was given to the cell. Now even Kevin Mitnick, with his dexterity and intelligence, could not bypass the system, and he was furious.

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At first, DEC, whose source code Kevin and Lenny accidentally uploaded to the servers of US military bases, planned to bring the most serious charges against Mitnick. The federal authorities also wanted to stage a high-profile and show trial of a dangerous hacker who posed a threat to national security. However, while Mitnick was in solitary confinement, the company's management reconsidered its position and became less harsh. As a result, Mitnick managed to conclude a pre-trial agreement: he admitted his guilt, revealed to Andy Goldstein from DEC all his methods of hacking their systems and testified against Lenny di Cicco, which Kevin was very, very happy about.

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As punishment, he was sent to a federal prison for one year, or, as they would say in Russia, to a penal colony. In addition, Mitnick had to spend another six months in a social rehabilitation center for ex-prisoners. Luckily for Kevin, in the colony in Lompoc, he was not placed with representatives of the criminal world from South Central or Grove Street, but with people who, like himself, were intelligent and were mostly in prison for financial crimes. One of his cellmates literally transformed Mitnick physically: he taught him to take long walks and exercise, and also convinced him to switch to a healthy diet. The hacker's physical data gradually returned to a more decent state.

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Mitnick had to learn to love dishes like rice with vegetables, which he had previously despised as a fast food fan.

However, literally on the eve of his release, life once again presented Mitnick with an unpleasant surprise. His beloved wife Bonnie, whom he dreamed of returning to every day in prison, announced that she was filing for divorce. Moreover, with the help of the same social engineering and his technical savvy, Mitnick learned that she had been cheating on him for some time with his best friend Lewis de Payne. Attempts to get Bonnie back were unsuccessful. In anger and stress, Kevin began to actively engage in physical exercise, and as a result, instead of 109 kilograms, he weighed only 64 kilograms.

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Kevin and Bonnie at the wedding (and this is before prison)

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Kevin after switching to physical and healthy lifestyle

After working for a while in tech support and rehabilitation, Mitnick moved to Las Vegas, where his mother lived. There he purchased one of the most advanced mobile phones of the time, the Novatel PTR-825. Kevin immediately began to think about how to use this phone to make calls and talk without being tracked and tapped by federal agencies. Using his social engineering skills and ability to bypass office procedures, Kevin, posing as a company employee, received several special chips with modified firmware from a certain Kumamoto-san from Novatel.

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Novatel PTR-825

There was still a lot of work to do after that, including a long game of cat and mouse with the FBI. But even in his later years, Mitnick considered this chip scam by Novatel and other companies to be the pinnacle of his social engineering skills. Each of these chips, with special firmware for technicians, allowed the phone's ESN to be freely changed and hidden from the cellular network, making it look like any other phone from the same manufacturer. Now Kevin was a ghost in American cellular networks, elusive to eavesdropping. As befits a Condor, Mitnick took this hacker pseudonym in honor of the protagonist of the 1975 American spy thriller, who masterfully evaded pursuit by CIA assassins.

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Mitnick liked to associate himself with the main character of the film Three Days of the Condor

And it was very fortunate, because soon Mitnick received information through mutual friends that Eric Heinz, one of the greatest hackers of his time, wanted to meet him. According to rumors, he and his team had penetrated the systems of US telephone companies so deeply that they could do whatever they wanted there, and Eric himself told how he bought himself two new Porsches by rigging the results of telephone TV contests. Kevin hesitated for a while, but eventually the thirst for adventure and hacking won out. He contacted Heinz through his "shadow" phone and they began to communicate carefully and gradually. Lewis de Payne, the same one who stole Kevin's wife, also took part in this. Mitnick never forgave him completely, but the quarrel did not last long, and the old friendship with a common passion for hacking outweighed the insult.

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Lewis de Payne, Kevin's best friend and a bit of an enemy

Eric clearly wanted something from Kevin and was trying to find out as much as possible about his hacking activities and his acquaintances in this field. Mitnick, of course, was wary - this all resembled some kind of trick on the part of the FBI. In his opinion, Heinz even phrased his questions like a cop or an investigator, and not like a hacker. But that was not the only problem. Mitnick could not find a normal job because of his reputation as a dangerous hacker. Worse, a special handler assigned to him according to protocol called every potential employer that Mitnick was supposed to tell him about and warned them about the possible risks of working with Kevin. Naturally, few were willing to take the risk. Mitnick was also kicked out of an advanced programming course at the University of Nevada. In the first week of classes, he could not resist and hacked a workstation, receiving administrative rights.

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Meanwhile, the conversations with Eric Heinz continued. One day, Heinz told Mitnick that he and another hacker, Kevin Poulsen, who was later captured by the FBI and sent to prison, had broken into a central telephone exchange in West Hollywood at night. There they found strange equipment and a Switched Access Service (SAS) unit in one of the rooms. As they found out, the system was intended for testing telephone lines, but in fact provided the ability to eavesdrop on telephone conversations on the network. Mitnick was fired up by the idea of getting personal access to this system.

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Using the same social engineering talents, he first obtained the system developers' contacts from Pacific Bell technicians. Then, posing as a Pacific Bell employee, he obtained detailed information on how to operate SAS, including remotely, from the system developers. Moreover, Mitnick managed to obtain complete technical data and instructions from the SAS developers. As a result, Kevin and Lewis were able to listen in on any call in Southern California. The scheme had a funny bug: when Kevin connected to the wiretapping system, he had to loudly hum into the receiver, simulating the beep that should have occurred when the equipment was triggered.

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Having received information from Heinz about the existence and capabilities of SAS, Mitnick first used it to figure out Heinz's number. Heinz never gave this number directly, contacting him through his other colleagues on a conference call. Then, posing as a telephone company repairman who was troubleshooting, Mitnick also learned the address of the house where Heinz lived. Mitnick especially emphasized that he was able to so easily deceive company employees and pretend to be their colleagues not because he came across frivolous idiots, but because he carefully studied typical process protocols, the manner of communication of people of different professions, professional slang and habits. Thanks to this, he could easily gain their trust, introducing himself as "one of their own from the next office."

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In essence, Kevin Mitnick was a kind of hybrid of a cool hacker and Ostap Bender

A lot changed in Kevin's life after a family tragedy that occurred in early 1992 in Los Angeles. His brother Adam was found dead in a car near a crack house. Doctors stated that the cause of death was a drug overdose. The LAPD, the Los Angeles police, did not show much interest in the death of "another fucking junkie" - it was 1992, literally the time and place of GTA San Andreas. However, Kevin decided to independently investigate his brother's death. He was bothered by the fact that the injection site of the syringe did not match the usual place. Kevin suspected two people of involvement in his brother's death: one of his friends and their mutual uncle Mitchell, who also abused substances and could have hooked his nephew on them.

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Unfortunately, all of Kevin's knowledge of hacking and social engineering didn't help him find the clues and collect evidence. It wasn't until many years later that one of Mitchell's ex-wives, who had already died, told him the truth: his uncle and Adam had indeed been using drugs together that night. Adam had overdosed after Mitchell's injection, and in a panic, his uncle didn't call 911, deciding that his own ass should be the priority, not his nephew's life. Instead, he and another addict put Adam in a car and drove his body to a known drug den.

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During the investigation, which Kevin tried to conduct in parallel with the hacking of the SAS system, he lived in his father's house and, thanks to the common tragedy, unexpectedly for himself for the first time in his life became close to him. However, at some point he realized that under the weight of his brother's death and consolation of his father, he made idiotic mistakes that could cost him very dearly. In particular, he used for some calls, including the hacking of SAS, not his "ghost phone", but one of the phones that were in his father's house. These phones could be tapped by the FBI, the police, or the Pacific Bell security service out of habit. Mitnick was still on probation and was at great risk of going to prison for a decent term for this. Of course, he really did not want to go to "jail" again.

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Kevin used technical skills and social engineering, posing as a Pacific Bell security officer, to find out from the switchboard operator at the nearest telephone exchange that there were three gray boxes attached to the wires at the exchange that security had installed there. Mitnick went cold, but found out through the operator that the wires were not wired at his father's house, but at a company called Teltec Investigation. It was engaged in private investigations and what is now called collection. And the head of the company, coincidentally, was an old acquaintance of Kevin's father named Mark Kasden.

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When Kevin and his father arrived at the Teltec Investigation office and told Kasden that his phones were being tapped, he just laughed and said that the young man was playing James Bond. A few minutes later, when Kevin, using his cell phone and SAS, playfully turned on the tap on the call between Mark's office and his girlfriend, Kasden was no longer laughing, but was amazed and delighted. And he suggested that Kevin consider working for his company. However, Mitnick continued to study the strange gray boxes for tapping through calls to Pacific Bell employees under the guise of their colleagues from different departments ... and at one fine moment he discovered that the said boxes were cunningly tapping three phones in his father's house, and not Teltec Investigation.

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The initial suspicions turned out to be correct: Pacific Bell's security service simply understood the extent of Mitnick's intelligence and skills and took measures to make surveillance of him as unnoticeable as possible. At the same time, the wiretapping was completely legal, with the consent of the police. Kevin was horrified: the specter of another incarceration became more tangible than ever. It was unclear when exactly the wiretapping began and how much the wiretappers had managed to learn about Kevin's latest illegal adventures. He urgently arranged for his father and Lewis to remove his computer and all incriminating materials from the house. After which they thought about it and managed to find a way to listen in on the wiretapping of Pacific Bell's security service. As it turned out, it was far from always carried out with the sanction of the police and the court - and in one case Kevin and Lewis discovered a wiretap on the phone of a federal judge.

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Then Kevin and Lewis had their first face-to-face meeting with Eric Heinz. They immediately disliked him: the guy was very arrogant, persistently talking about how he changed women like gloves, and clearly assumed that "these two" would beg him to let them work with him, the great hacker, at least a little. However, no one was going to beg him - and this clearly angered Heinz. He said that during an illegal penetration of the Pacific Bell station, he managed to get a copy of the dossier on Mitnick, which was kept by the company's security service. Naturally, Mitnick was very interested in getting this information, but when asked directly, Eric began to evade and say that he did not remember where he put it, and would try to look for it, but did not promise anything.

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Eric Heinz looked like this

Kevin and Lewis decided to impress their arrogant interlocutor themselves and told him, with a demonstration on their laptop, that they had full access to the very SAS system that he had told them about. Heinz again could not or did not want to hide his anger that the "newbies" had bypassed him in such an important matter. And then things started to get weird. Eric literally demanded that his interlocutors not touch SAS - supposedly it was too dangerous, since this system, which made it easy to wiretap phones, was used by (who would have thought, yeah) the FBI. Then Eric went to the toilet... leaving his laptop on the table in the cafe, as if inviting his friends to look in. Kevin and Lewis thought it was some kind of setup and did not risk it.

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An example of a laptop from the early 90s, Toshiba T3200SX

Upon returning, Heinz boasted that he had a universal key for physical access to any of the telephone exchanges. The parties parted clearly dissatisfied with each other, but at the same time interested in each other's resources. However, Kevin was literally running out of time and his ass: he did not know from what date the wiretapping had been installed in his father's house, and what the security service and the FBI might know. If they knew too much and were just waiting for a convenient opportunity to arrest him, it was time for him to flee the United States to any country that did not have an extradition agreement with Washington. Kevin and Lewis, knowing the previously calculated address of Heinz's home, went there - and found not a hacker's hut, but a pretentious apartment complex with a swimming pool and other joys of life.

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Modern photo of this apartment, 3636 S Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

Eric was literally furious that they showed up at his house without asking. Kevin asked for a master key. Eric refused to give it to him. Kevin risked telling him about the wiretapping in his father's house. Eric still refused to give the key, but suggested going to the center together some night. After that, he openly gave his friends the cold shoulder for a while, each time promising "tomorrow for sure." One morning, instead of another denial, Eric suddenly said that he went there himself, correctly named all the numbers his father was wiretapping, and said that the wiretapping had begun on January 27. However, there was a nuance: Eric said that they did not have to break the mechanical lock on the door, since he was not there that night.

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However, Kevin often drove past that center and saw that the lock was always in place, including that morning. The oddities multiplied. Kevin and Lewis increasingly suspected Eric of being a pathological liar at best, and of working for the FBI at worst. The arrest of Kevin Poulsen, with whom Eric had previously worked and penetrated the phone center, also took on particularly unpleasant tones in this light. When the friends discovered that all the numbers of the Impac Corporation company, where Lewis worked, as well as his home, were wiretapped, they decided to try to expose Eric.

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They called him from a ghost phone and told him about Lewis's wiretap. Eric promised to try to figure it out, but for some reason he immediately refused to consider the version that it was the FBI. The next day, Eric called them himself on the agreed number - saying that he was calling from a pay phone. But the call was clearly not from a pay phone. Worse, Heinz tried to get Lewis to verbally admit to using illegal mechanisms at work. At the same time, Lewis called Eric's home number, where an unknown man immediately answered. Irritated, Heinz said that no one should be at his house, he did not like these oddities and he was lying low.

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Kevin and Lewis rolled up their sleeves and threw everything they had into figuring out who this fucking Eric Heinz was. Their first few discoveries made their hair stand on end: the calls from Heinz's apartment revealed that he was calling the FBI's Los Angeles headquarters, among other places. Then things got even more fun: they discovered that he had been given an expensive apartment without the usual background checks and so on, and that he was listed there under the name Joseph Wernl. They also found a cell phone number... which turned out to be registered to U.S. government agencies and the name Mike Martinez. Finally, when they got hold of a printout of the calls from that number, they found out that it was constantly calling not only the FBI's Los Angeles headquarters, but also some numbers in Washington, D.C.

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"Eric Heinz" was definitely and very actively working for the FBI, this could be considered proven. The only question was whether he was a career undercover agent, which did not fit well with his image of an informal metalhead and strange for an FBI officer manners and complexes, or whether the feds were simply using him as an informant and provocateur in the hacker environment for money, and / or keeping him on the hook for past sins. Having obtained some more classified data, Kevin managed to identify some of "Eric's" regular telephone interlocutors: they, as expected, were FBI employees and Pacific Bell security service. Mitnick even managed to establish the name of the head of his new adversary: Ken McGuire, a career FBI agent from the WCC3 special unit for combating "white-collar crime".

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With the help of social engineering, Kevin managed to figure out the real name of "Eric": Joseph Weiss. A career FBI agent. Yes, in the intelligence services of any country there are quite a lot of people who are quite typical for an experienced eye of types, manners and bearing, but still, not all intelligence officers look like intelligence officers. Joseph Weiss, who looked like literally the complete opposite of a typical "federal", who were nicknamed glowies for their visibility even under cover, is a striking example of this.

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Joseph Weiss's documents, which Mitnick would later obtain

Kevin knew that the FBI was literally on his tail. However, he had no intention of fleeing the country or at least hiding and lying low. Instead, he led a demonstratively ordinary life... and carefully, with the help of his ghost phone, SAS and growing access to various institutions and their databases, began to study those who were obliged to follow him. Namely: Joseph Weiss and his colleagues. Thus began the very game of cat and mouse between Kevin Mitnick and the FBI, which became a legend in the history of the hacker movement, and turned Mitnick himself into one of the most wanted criminals in the United States, whom even the FBI employees treated with respect and admiration. But more on that in the next part!


Part 6: Cat and Mouse with the Feds

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In the previous part, we told how Kevin Mitnick and his friend Lewis managed to figure out the fake hacker "Eric Heinz" - FBI agent Joseph Weiss with the appearance of a slacker rocker, who was playing an operational game with them. The friends, thanks to technical skills and social communications skills, managed to figure out many details - right down to Weiss's colleagues at the Los Angeles FBI headquarters and the address of his parents. At first, Kevin thought about fleeing the country - he really didn't want to end up in prison again, but excitement, a sense of protest and a desire to screw the system over again took over. Mitnick began to play cat and mouse with the FBI. While the FBI tried to follow him and collect evidence for the trial of "the most dangerous hacker in the United States", he learned to track every step of the agents hunting him.

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Kevin Mitnick later said that he literally couldn't resist looking for all the information he could about his new enemy: FBI agent Joseph Weiss, aka "famous hacker" Eric Heinz, aka apartment tenant Joseph Veril, aka cell phone subscriber Mike Martinez. Mitnick was also interested in Weiss's immediate superior, Ken McGuire, at FBI headquarters in Los Angeles.

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Ken McGuire still works for the FBI today.

To further penetrate the secrets of the feds pursuing him, Mitnick skillfully and habitually disguised himself as a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) employee from a special unit that handled law enforcement and emergency services. Employees of this unit were required by security protocols to request certain data from police officers, FBI agents, and so on, since they were giving them access to classified data on civilian suspects.

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DWP building in Los Angeles

Mitnick took advantage of this cheat. He went under the guise of a DRW employee to the FBI Special Investigations Division, which had caused problems for Kevin back in college, and obtained from a certain Sergeant Davidson a list of the agency employees in contact with DRW "for the formation of a correct database." And then (oh, the holy simplicity of the 90s!) a list of passwords for these employees, which they had to give to control access to sensitive information. Kevin then used the personal data of the careless Sergeant Davidson to make calls allegedly from the FBI Special Investigations Division especially often.

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What can you do?

Mitnick's first move was to find out "Eric Heinz's" new address (he had just rented a new apartment in the same expensive apartment complex) and his new phone number, which was a real turnoff when the FBI agent didn't bother to register it under another fake name. Kevin's next target was the California DMV. He called the sheriff's office extension as a police lieutenant named Moore, and spoke with enough inside knowledge that he was given a special DMV number to contact law enforcement without question or hesitation.

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Then Mitnick figured out that calls to that number were being forwarded to one of 20 different numbers in the DMV database, so he arranged for one of them to be forwarded to his ghost phone. He began receiving calls from the police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Administration, and even the Secret Service, the oldest U.S. intelligence agency, which protects top officials and combats counterfeiters.

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Secret Service employees on duty

According to protocol, all callers gave the operator their login details and passwords to log into the system, so that it could be tracked who was requesting what information about vehicle registrations for individuals and organizations. Mitnick diligently wrote down all this data until he had collected a sufficient database to log in under the names and passwords of many employees of different agencies. Then he turned off the forwarding, as if nothing had happened. Now Kevin could find out in a matter of minutes who was registered to certain cars, including those used for external surveillance and detentions by FBI agents. This would save him from arrest more than once.

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At the same time, Kevin Mitnick was officially hired by the private investigation company Teltec. Its director Mark Kasden, a friend of Kevin's father, and co-owner Michael Grant were impressed by Mitnick's skills in gaining access to wiretaps and various classified data - which was very useful in their work as private detectives and collectors. They were also very interested in why someone had connected listening devices to their telephone lines. Kevin managed to find out that the wiretaps were installed by employees of the sheriff's department and the security service of the Pacific Bell telephone company, which very often became the target of his hacks, because of which he was repeatedly caught by law enforcement, and with which he had been conducting a kind of mutual vendetta for several years.

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A typical Pacific Bell payphone

As it turned out, Teltec's office had been raided a few months earlier, suspected of illegally accessing credit card databases. Kevin managed to wiretap the line between a sheriff's department employee and the phone company's security service, and found out that the Teltec case had stalled completely. This pleased his new bosses.

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Then Kevin thought about making some money using the method that "Eric Heinz" bragged about: winning radio contests with phone calls from listeners. Mitnick and his friend Lewis figured out how to do this: they got the radio station's internal number to bypass filters that limited the connection speed and the number of incoming calls from the official 8-800-... contest number, and organized "drum" dialing to always be the first. The thing is, the winner of a typical contest at Los Angeles radio station KRTH was simply the one who got through after a certain number of callers.

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The scheme worked. Kevin and Lewis split the first prize of $1,000 in half. However, the same person could only become a prize winner once a year, so the friends organized the scheme through their relatives and acquaintances: whoever agreed to accept the money into their account received $400, and Kevin and Lewis split the remaining $600. Many agreed, since at that time... it was not even considered fraud or an offense. Having won about 50 times, the friends exhausted the supply of their acquaintances and "earned" about $7,000 each. According to Mitnick, this was the first time he used his skills to get money, and not just out of interest. For $6,000, Kevin bought his first laptop in his life, the then-fashionable Toshiba T4400SX with a 486 processor.

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Toshiba T4400SX

And at that time he came up with a very insidious plan to fool the FBI at least until his suspended sentence ended in a few months and it would become much more difficult to throw him back in prison. He decided to deliberately leak to "Eric" through Lewis a fake about how he was going to contact some cool hacker group in Europe, either in Germany or Bulgaria, to participate in electronic hacking and theft of money from accounts.

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The logic of the plan was as follows. Kevin still didn't know how much and what the FBI had managed to dig up about him since the surveillance and wiretapping of his father's house began. They could well have evidence to take him at any moment and throw him in prison for violating his parole. But if the FBI decided that the dangerous hacker Mitnick was going to go on a big and directly criminal case, then they would not take him, but would only keep an eye on him, so that they could take him at the last moment and loudly announce to the American people about the heroic capture of a threat to national security, a villain of computer technology.

Spoiler alert: this was far from the best idea Kevin Mitnick ever had.

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The canard was launched, "Eric" became extremely interested and began to try to find out details from Lewis, but he denied that the cautious Mitnick had not told him any details. In parallel, Kevin began to listen in on calls from the Pacific Bell security manager, who was helping the FBI track Mitnick, using his ghost phone and a hacked SAS system.

While listening to one of the manager's audio conferences with his colleagues, he finally heard something that pertained to him: Pacific Bell's security team was brainstorming about how to finally catch the damn Mitnick, collect evidence on him, and hand it over to the FBI so that they could put the annoying hacker and phreaker behind bars. Kevin resisted the huge, mischievous temptation to jump in and say, "I don't think this is going to work. This Mitnick is pretty smart! You never know, maybe he's listening to us right now!"

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The trouble came from an unexpected source: the police arrested Teltec owner Armand Grant. His son and the company director posted bail for him, but they were told that Armand would not be released for a couple of days. Mitnick offered to solve the problem in 15 minutes. He dialed the prison bail department's internal phone, introduced himself as a police lieutenant, and said that Armand should be released out of turn immediately after the bail money was deposited in the account, since he was helping with an important investigation. Soon Armand was met by his son and the company director.

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Mitnick's search for all possible information about "Eric Heinz" became literally maniacal. After a long search, mostly using social engineering methods, he managed to find the numbers of his two Wells Fargo bank accounts and the latest transaction statements using the Social Security number he had already obtained. To Kevin's surprise, thousands of dollars were constantly coming and going from the accounts every week. He never showed up at Alta-Services, where the owner of these accounts was officially listed under the pseudonym Joseph Veril. Kevin became even more curious - and to clarify the picture of what was happening, he decided to get the tax return of the FBI agent who was following him.

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However, the IRS discovered that "Veril" had not paid a cent of income in the last two years, because, according to the IRS, he had no income! Even more surprised, Kevin discovered that "Eric" had in the meantime finally left the apartment complex for an unknown destination. No big deal: Mitnick quickly found out "Joseph Veril's" new address through the already hacked Department of Water and Electricity. However, after Kevin's call, he quickly moved out again.

Then, knowing the number of "Eric-Joseph's" pager, Kevin found out its unique SAP code, bought a similar one and persuaded the company manager to enter it into the device on the grounds that "I accidentally drowned the previous one in the toilet." Now all messages that came to the agent's pager were duplicated on Mitnick's new pager. In addition, Kevin finally figured out how to wiretap "Eric's" phone number through the SAS system: after all, doing it directly was dangerous and pointless, the system made a characteristic click when triggered, which the subscriber could hear, and the agent knew this very well. However, Mitnick figured out how to bypass the restriction, and as usual instructed another company employee on what needed to be done on the equipment.

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He did it just in time: soon he heard "Eric" discussing with his boss, Special Agent Ken McGuire, that Mitnick's home needed to be searched, and that in order to get a search warrant, he needed to collect at least some evidence. Kevin put down a pile of bricks on the spot, urgently changed his phone number once again, and rushed to tell Lewis that the feds were really on his tail and that he needed to get rid of any possible evidence immediately. Having shoved all the suspicious equipment and disks among reliable friends and relatives, Mitnick exhaled a little... and began to dig further about "Eric".

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He managed to get a number from the Social Security system registered in the name of Eric Heinz. However, the database indicated that the bearer of this number was a disabled person receiving benefits who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. In addition, it was indicated that Heinz's father was his full namesake. Having obtained his phone number and calling under the cover of a former classmate, Kevin was shocked once again: Eric Heinz Sr. considered the call a very cruel joke, and explained that his son with the same name died with his mother in a car accident at the age of two, and he never had any classmates. Mitnick even managed to get a copy of the death certificate of the real Eric Heinz from the Seattle Bureau of Vital Statistics.

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Mitnick also managed to obtain a copy of the driver's license for "Eric Heinz"

As Kevin continued to analyze the FBI's phone traffic, he discovered that Ken McGuire was frequently calling the same number. The number, it turned out, belonged to David Schindler, an assistant U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Poulsen, a former colleague of "Eric Heinz" who had, by some strange coincidence, fallen into the FBI's trap and then into prison. This confirmed Kevin's worst fears: this was serious, the system was working hard and purposefully to put him in prison. Mitnick really didn't want to go to prison.

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Mitnick managed to find out a new phone number through the same phone traffic analysis, and through it, the fourth address of "Eric" that he could remember: it was again an expensive apartment, this time near Hollywood. FBI agents live well, Kevin thought. And he began to prepare for a possible visit to his Teltec office. The thing is that Mitnick spent the night and hacked from his laptop "in secluded places", but even he couldn't work remotely at that time.

However, his work brought him not only legal money, but also moral satisfaction: he sincerely enjoyed helping to find and put the screws on various assholes, like malicious alimony defaulters or crazy relatives who kidnapped children from their parents. True, the methods of work of both Mitnick personally and Teltec allowed them to please and fork out their clients, but from the point of view of American laws they were more than questionable.

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Kevin bought a radio frequency scanner and a cellular data interpreter. He managed to set up the equipment so that it would alert him whenever any of the numbers he had previously identified as belonging to the FBI, all of the "Eric" subscribers, and other characters he didn't want to cross paths with appeared in the coverage area of the cell tower closest to his office. Again, this was a good time.

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One September morning in 1992, Kevin arrived at work before everyone else and heard a distinctive squeak from his work station. The system recorded the appearance of a cell phone in the coverage area of the tower near the office, and not just anyone, but the FBI Special Agent in Charge Ken McGuire, who was personally in charge of his case. He had been in the area for two hours already, and managed to make a call to a pay phone. Having immediately found out the address of the pay phone, Mitnick became even colder: the pay phone was located literally across the street from the rented apartment where he spent the night. The morning was no longer languid at all. The FBI was on Mitnick's tail almost literally.

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Having exhaled slightly and having decided that if they were going to take him, most likely the mousetrap would have already slammed shut, and he himself would be lying on the floor and listening to the Miranda rules, Kevin waited for his superiors. He told them that it seemed like they had come for him - and they, being people experienced in such matters, were surprised only by the cunning and foresight of their colleague. Having taken all his things from the office, Mitnick, expecting a chase at any second, rushed out of the city to the north along Highway 101. Having got out and not noticing a tail, he called Lewis and warned him about what was happening. Then they additionally tried to get rid of all potential evidence. Kevin returned to Los Angeles and stayed for a day in a motel not far from his previous home. Having exhaled even more, and even going to work in the office without incident the next day, he regained his composure and decided ... to mock the FBI a little.

He returned to the rented apartment, which was already known to the feds, buying donuts along the way and putting them in a box with a large sign that read "Donuts for the FBI." He left the box in the refrigerator and wrote a similar sign on the door. Then he went to bed.

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The love of police officers and security forces in general for donuts is an old American meme

At six in the morning on September 30, 1992, they came for him. True, Kevin woke up from the scraping of a master key in the lock - and in horror assumed that instead of agents (usually loudly knocking on the door and shouting about their departmental affiliation), robbers were trying to break in. Quite a normal assumption, given the place and time of what was happening: LA 1992 is literally a real prototype and source of inspiration for GTA San Andreas.

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Mitnick yelled, "Who's there?!", hoping to scare off the robbers by telling them the owner would be ready to fight back. From behind the door, however, came the cry, "Open up, FBI!" At that moment, Kevin realized once again that he had somewhat overestimated his self-control, fearlessness, and moral readiness for a search. Chilled, he went to open the door, and only by the mechanically lowered gaze of the FBI agent who appeared in front of him did he realize that he had come out to the agents as if he were sleeping - completely naked.

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As Mitnick had expected, the search was very thorough, but it yielded nothing. He was even a little offended that no one appreciated his joke with the donuts. Then one of the agents - Special Agent Richard Beasley, already familiar to him from previous misadventures - began the conversation. First of all, he quite traditionally told that Lewis "has already given all the evidence against you, so you better spill it yourself, otherwise you'll be gone for a long time." Kevin did not believe this, since he and Lewis had discussed this more than once, and the FBI certainly should not have had any evidence in this direction. However, then Agent Beasley turned on an audio cassette ... on which Kevin proudly showed Mark and Michael from Teltec the wiretap of Detective Simon and Pacific Bell security specialist Santos about the surveillance of Teltec.

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However, to Mitnick's sincere surprise, he had not yet been arrested: there was still insufficient evidence for an arrest warrant. He said that he needed to consult with his father and a lawyer, and went to the car. The FBI agents also searched the car - and, to Kevin's horror, they found several forgotten in the glove compartment in the confusion of hiding the disks. He was accompanied by two cars with agents the entire way to his father's house - but they were unable to enter the home without a warrant. When the agents finally left, Mitnick rushed to the office. He did not find any agents or a search there, he breathed a sigh of relief, and just in case, arranged Format Disc C. For such arbitrary use of important company data, Michael Grant became furious and fired Mitnick. Later, Kevin learns that Grant was also going to use potentially incriminating data from his computer to leak it to the FBI and, at this price, get an improvement in the situation with the persecution of his father by law enforcement officers.

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There were still three months left on his probation. Mitnick needed to hold out and not get arrested during that time—it would be much harder to put him away later. In early November, he tried to ask his probation officer for permission to go to Las Vegas to visit his mother and grandmother and celebrate Thanksgiving. To his surprise, he received permission on the condition that he report to the Nevada probation office and return by December 4. However, either his growing paranoia or his sixth sense literally forced him to stop shortly after entering the outskirts of the city and start listening to the Vegas police department’s radio using a specially converted radiogram.

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Las Vegas 1992 is also very atmospherically conveyed in GTA SA

He studied how cops asked if a car was wanted, went on air, and asked for the same information about his own car. He got the cryptic response, "Are you clear with 440?" After asking the operator to stay on the line, he found out over the phone, posing as a DEA agent, what the code number meant to the Vegas police. It turned out that 440 meant "wanted person." And the operator's question was whether the calling cop could talk out of earshot of the suspect.

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That's how Mitnick learned that a warrant had already been issued for his arrest, and that he was now wanted in every state. He later learned that he had been wanted back in early November for illegally accessing the voicemail of a Pacific Bell security officer, but for some reason they were in no hurry to arrest him. Now there was no question of going to the probation office to report: Kevin was officially a hunted man, and they would immediately seize him. He snuck into the Sahara Casino, where his mother was then a waitress, and told her everything. She was horrified and took him home to his grandmother.

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Kevin hid with them for a while, notifying the department of his arrival by phone, claiming to be seriously ill, but then asked them to take him back to Los Angeles exactly by the evening of December 4, as he was obliged by the agreement with the handler. On December 7, his probation was ending, and he had a glimmer of hope that after that date the arrest warrant would be invalid.

He spent two nights in his apartment so as not to aggravate the situation by violating the parole rules, although he was very afraid of being arrested. Early in the morning on December 5 and 6, he went out to wander the streets and watch movies in the cinemas. Finally, December 7 arrived. The parole period ended. This time, he went to spend the night at his cousin's, and his mother stayed in the rented apartment to help pack for the move.

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Every moment of time during these three days Kevin was expecting something like this.

On the morning of December 10, three men came to the apartment: a bailiff with an arrest warrant, and two FBI agents — including Ken McGuire himself. The mother told them she didn’t know where Kevin had gone, because “we had had a fight the night before and he had gone somewhere.”

Kevin realized that the only way to stay free was to go underground and live the life of a wanted criminal on the run. A new stage in the difficult life of one of the greatest hackers and "Ostap Benders" of American history was beginning. Since childhood, Kevin Mitnick admired and associated himself with the main character of the film "Three Days of the Condor", who skillfully hid from pursuit by CIA killers. Now he had to find himself in his shoes in practice.


Part 7: The Ghost in the Dead Man's Mask

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So, December 1992 arrived. The cunning Mitnick failed to avoid the court issuing warrants for his arrest at the last moment of his suspended sentence. The gears of the US law enforcement machine were slowly but surely turning for his soul - and the FBI agents were even somewhat lazy and indifferent about detaining the hacker. They probably thought that a 100% computer geek, with all his skills in tricking the system, would not dare to go on the run and live underground. They underestimated how much Mitnick did not like prison - and how much he did not want to end up behind bars again.

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Mitnick was planning to leave Los Angeles for Las Vegas by the most obvious route: Interstate 15, made famous by Hunter Thompson and Terry Gilliam. But before he set off, Kevin couldn’t resist taking another step in studying his personal nemesis, FBI agent “Eric Heinz,” who was masquerading as a successful hacker. Posing as an L.A. County Fugitive Income Tax agent, he requested copies of the driver’s licenses of all three of his opponent’s fake identities from the vehicle registration service.

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Ken McGuire still works for the FBI today.

He asked for copies to be faxed to the Kinko's Club in the Hollywood studio area "for urgency." Mitnick, who was hiding at the time with his cousin Truvy, didn't know that the feds had already figured out this move, and the operator immediately reported the call to the senior special investigator of the same agency. He suggested sending Mitnick any suitable fake ID, and a standard template ID in the name of the non-existent "Annie Driver" was faxed to the club. Cars with vehicle registration investigator Shirley Lessiak, her team of colleagues, and a plainclothes FBI representative immediately left for the club to detain "one of the most dangerous hackers in the United States."

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DWP building in Los Angeles

Mitnick, probably still not fully aware of the seriousness of the situation and the hunt for him, went to the club with his grandmother to get copies. Having parked for cover in a disabled parking space near a supermarket, the grandmother stayed in the car, and Kevin went to pick up the documents. By that time, law enforcement officers had been lying in wait for him for about two hours, and were sincerely waiting for the “damn Mitnick” to show up as soon as possible. The FBI agent even left on more urgent business. The hall turned out to be overcrowded, and it was Kevin’s turn to get angry and wait in line to receive a fax: there weren’t many of them in use yet, and receiving faxes was a popular commercial service.

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Mitnick had no idea that he was already being followed by several people who had been hiding in the crowd of visitors. He had no suspicions even when the coveted folder turned out to contain the license of some unknown lady instead of "Eric Heinz". Outraged by the carelessness of the vehicle registration service employees, Mitnick wandered around the hall and thought about what to do, and he was followed by plainclothes officers of her own security unit, led by investigator Lessyak, waiting for a convenient moment to detain him.

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Finally, Kevin left the building through the back door to vent his frustration on a pay phone – and as soon as he started dialing, he saw four men in civilian clothes, led by an energetic lady. They approached and introduced themselves as employees of the investigations department of the vehicle registration service. At this point, Mitnick was already acting on reflexes fueled by paranoia. Roaring, “I don’t want to talk to you!” he threw fax sheets into the air in the hope of distracting his pursuers – and took off running.

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At that moment, he really appreciated all the time and effort he had devoted to training, losing weight, proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. And also his habit of wearing sports shorts and a T-shirt under his regular clothes. Having easily broken away from his less trained pursuers, almost like parkour through alleys and gateways, he threw his sweater and trousers into some bushes - and ran on, already under the guise of a person training on a run. After 45 minutes, he finally exhaled - and from the nearest pay phone, he dialed his grandmother on the cell phone that was left in the car.

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Novatel PTR-825, which is roughly what Mitnik was using at the time

Nobody picked up the phone. Kevin had time to panic for her until he thought of calling his cousin and asking her to find his grandmother. She was found in the car, where Mitnick had left her. When, already at the agreed place in a remote cafe, he asked her why she had not picked up her cell phone, his grandmother was genuinely surprised and said that she had no idea how to use this ingenious device and was afraid of breaking something. It simply did not occur to Kevin that an elderly person from the early 90s might not know how to use a mobile phone. His grandmother also said that she tried to find her grandson in the building, but all she saw was a very puzzled lady with a videotape under her arm: it was investigator Lessiak, who had lost Mitnick, and she had a recording with Kevin’s images from surveillance cameras with her.

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And so, the desert hills of eastern California and western Nevada were already flashing past the windows. Kevin was racing to Las Vegas in his beloved grandmother's car. She was driving - and, apparently, the cops did not yet have a description of her car. The trip passed without incident, Kevin stayed with friends of relatives. By this time, he had already drawn up preliminary sketches of plans for further action. The first step was to quickly create a temporary false identity. The second - a more thorough registration of the most plausible new persona with all the papers and documents. Approximately as "Eric Heinz" had already done more than once.

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He had the system to back him up, of course, with four profiles created for him as an undercover FBI agent. But Mitnick decided to follow in his footsteps, albeit completely illegally. Kevin Mitnick was to disappear without a trace from the eyes of the state - and the hacker who bore that name was going to start a new life somewhere else under a new name. How to do it? Our hero was going to use both his extensive experience in social engineering and the results of his observation of "Eric Heinz" and his methods, as well as a semi-underground collection of tips for such cases called The Paper Trip.

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The Paper Trip, by a certain Barry Reid — most likely also a pseudonym — was published in 1970 by the Californian counterculture publishing house Eden Press. It was intended to help Americans at odds with the system — like anti-war activists, social justice fighters, and radicals of all kinds — hide from its all-seeing eye by posing as other people. The manual suggested the best way to do this was to use the names, birth certificates, and Social Security numbers of deceased people who were similar in age, gender, skin color, and other characteristics — a method called ghosting.

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The calculation was that the integration of different databases from different US agencies was only at the initial stage, the entire system was poorly computerized, and the Social Security Service might have no idea that a person with a particular social security number had been dead for many years. Databases in different states were poorly integrated, and often not integrated at all.

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The manual considered the best option for the initial selection of candidates for ghosting to be a search in old newspapers for publications about families who had died collectively while traveling to other states: this reduced the likelihood of meeting living "relatives" and made it difficult to link databases about what had happened in different states due to the peculiarities of American document flow. This is roughly how the same "Eric Heinz" came into being - whose real prototype died in a car accident with his mother at the age of two, and his name and data were useful to the FBI to create a legend of its undercover agent in the hacker environment.

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However, in order to urgently create a temporary conspiratorial identity, Mitnick decided to borrow the data of a completely living person. Under the guise of a postal inspector, he contacted the vehicle registration service of the northwestern state of Oregon and requested data on a certain Eric Weiss, born between 1958 and 1968. Why Eric and Weiss? These were the real first and last names of the famous magician, who gained worldwide fame under the name Harry Houdini. Mitnick once again could not resist a postmodern joke - and decided to temporarily borrow the data of the namesake of the great illusionist, whom he admired since childhood.

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There was such a person in the database with a birth date of 1968 - five years younger than Kevin. However, thirty-year-old Mitnick was in excellent physical shape and could pass for a person of 25 years old. Then he found a number - and dialed ... Eric Weiss himself, asking if he was a graduate of Oregon's main university, Portland State University. He replied that he was confused with someone else, because he graduated from the university in Ellensburg. Having the first leads, Mitnick managed in a few weeks of social engineering and studying databases to extract almost all the personal data of the unsuspecting manager from Oregon and organize for himself a virtually complete package of documents in his name.

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Kevin obtained a copy of the birth certificate and forged a W-2 tax form with data on salary and taxes at his alleged previous place of work. Based on this, he passed the driving test under the legend that he had lived in Australia for several years, where traffic drives on the left side of the road, and wanted to make sure that he had the skills to drive in the United States, where traffic drives on the right side of the road. This is how he obtained a driver's license in the name of Eric Weiss - which in the States largely replaces the functions of an internal passport in other countries. And the license allowed him to obtain an official duplicate of the social security policy - with which he could officially get a job.

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From Vegas, Kevin Mitnick moved to Denver, the capital of Colorado on the border of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. He chose this place as one of the most dynamically developing cities in the country with a fairly strong IT sector. At the same time, Colorado is located far from California, where he was sought, in the very heart of the United States. In addition, Kevin always dreamed of learning to ski, and from Denver to the ski resorts was a stone's throw: mountain ranges with ice caps are visible directly from the city.

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Having reached Denver and temporarily settled into a motel, Mitnick began to look for a job in some company with a computer profile. He wrote a fake, but beautiful and convincing resume - and went to get a job in the local office of a large international law firm Holm, Roberts and Owens. At the interview, in order not to arouse suspicions of excessive knowledge, more typical of a hacker, he deliberately gave several incorrect answers on the technical part. His last place of work was listed as a non-existent Green Valley Systems from Vegas - and when HR called the number indicated in the resume, Kevin, slightly changing his voice, without unnecessary modesty gave himself the most flattering recommendations. Soon he was hired with a salary of $ 28,000 per year. He was supposed to go to the office in two weeks to become a general computer specialist, literally an IT guy.

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Now, while there was still some free time left, he had to create another, permanent fake identity, which would be much more difficult to undermine. His choice fell on South Dakota - one of the quietest, most remote, agricultural and provincial states in the entire US - with a population of less than 700 thousand people at the time. Literally "Barnaul, Altai Krai" from the meme. There, Mitnick figured, the digitalization of databases and their comparison with databases of other states would not happen soon, and a lot of water would flow under the bridge since then. In addition, in South Dakota, death certificates were public documents, and any citizen had the right to access them.

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Kevin made 20 business cards in the name of a private detective named Eric Weiss, which had a fictitious Nevada private detective license number, a fictitious Las Vegas address, and a fake phone number that went to an answering service. He made his way to the state capital, the town of Pierre with a population of only 13,000, and showed up at the state registrar's office in a formal business suit. The head of the organization was very gracious about the visit of such a polite person, and provided all possible assistance to the "investigation."

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Growing up in the California metropolis, Mitnick was literally captivated by the quiet pastoral landscapes of South Dakota and the town of Pierre

Determined to create a new official identity, Mitnick dug through the archives in search of records of white children under three years old, originally from states not neighboring South Dakota, who died in South Dakota between 1965 and 1975. Along the way, Kevin used his social engineering skills to help one of the employees find her lost relative from Vegas — for which he was finally recognized by the team as “one of the guys.” He also accidentally found some treasures he really needed: blank birth certificates were simply lying around in boxes in one of the offices, and the official state seal (!) was simply always on one of the tables. In California or Nevada, such a thing would have been completely unthinkable, but South Dakota was a very quiet and peaceful place.

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Seizing the right moment, Mitnick quietly grabbed the seal, locked himself in one of the offices and in five minutes organized 50 birth certificate forms with official seals, after which he returned everything to its original position. When Kevin finally sifted through all the archives, the employees saw him off almost as if he were a colleague about to quit, hugged him and almost cried. Having reached Denver, Mitnick, through his acquaintance from the Social Security Administration, picked up a suitable name for a dead child, to whom the parents had managed to assign a social security number. It turned out to be a certain Brian Merrill: now Kevin had to become a person with this first and last name.

For Mitnick, the quiet and calm office routine in a 50-story skyscraper in downtown Denver had finally begun. In his free time, he learned to ski, improved his legal literacy to avoid new problems with the law, and went to rock concerts. And everything seemed to be going well, but our hero’s misadventures were not going to end there…


Part 8: The Underground Man Gone Wild

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In the previous part, our hero took advantage of yet another loophole in the system and created two new identities: a temporary one under the name of Eric Weiss and a more developed one under the name of Brian Merrill. Having obtained documents and records in state databases by hook or by crook, Kevin Mitnick got a job in the Denver office of an international law firm under the first pseudonym. The office routine of a generalist in a very friendly team of employees alternated with skiing in the picturesque Rocky Mountains, hours in the gym, long bike rides, trips to rock concerts and blackjack in Indian casinos. FBI agents seemed to have lost track of him and did not show themselves in any way. Life finally turned to the side he was looking for for “one of the most dangerous hackers in the United States”. But Mitnick would not be himself if he was satisfied with such a peaceful and quiet life.

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Denver, nestled in the Rocky Mountains, is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States in terms of its surroundings.

Naturally, Mitnick, like a seasoned bird, did not forget to insure himself. Among other things, he wrote a special script, thanks to which any calls from the company's phones to the phones of the FBI offices and the US federal prosecutor's office in Los Angeles and Denver would immediately result in a coded message being sent to his pager. During his time working at the Denver branch of Holm, Roberts and Owens, the script worked twice: each time Kevin's heart sank below his heels, but both times it turned out that the calls had nothing to do with him. Just in case, he grew his hair long and had a mustache, which he had never worn before.

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There are no surviving photos of this period of Mitnick's life, but he probably looked something like this

In addition, Mitnick at that time lived and worked under a temporary and not very well-developed pseudonym in terms of the legend, Eric Weiss - with the data of an unsuspecting real middle manager from the northwestern state of Oregon. He was not completely sure that he had thrown the feds off his tail - and refrained from starting a serious friendship with anyone, much less a relationship. He already knew that if they took him again, the FBI would give everyone close to him a lot of stress, and did not want to set up people he liked - with whom in another situation he would be happy to be friends or meet. Out of the same precautions not to blab to anyone too much, Mitnick almost never drank, even at corporate parties - except for light cocktails in bars.

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However, there were also more cynical considerations: he was afraid of letting it slip at some point to a loved one, after which the latter could accidentally or even intentionally cast unnecessary suspicion on him. Mitnick, who once dreamed of being like the main character of the political thriller Three Days of the Condor, now literally found himself in the shoes of an illegal agent in hostile territory, and this turned out to be by no means as exciting as in spy films. But it was very lonely and very nervous. It is not surprising that many real intelligence officers, and not the steely super-agents from films and tabloid novels, have progressive mental problems (which is often why they fall apart), which they compensate for with alcohol and other not particularly useful things.

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The only exception and gap in the security system of the illegal Mitnick were regular phone calls with his mother and grandmother, without which his cuckoo, worn out by persecution and loneliness, could really fly away somewhere. His mother would call him from a random phone in the Sahara casino, where she worked - and the call would go to a pre-agreed number, which he would enter into his cunningly upgraded phone. After several months of living in Denver, he could not stand it any longer and came by train to Vegas: several meetings with his mother and grandmother in secret, pre-agreed locations took place literally in the format of spy safe houses (Kevin suspected that his relatives were being secretly followed by the FBI with the aim of catching him).

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And with all this, Kevin Mitnick... could not give up his main passion: hacking and gaining access to other people's data through social engineering. So, having hacked the computer of a hacker friend from Los Angeles and having found the login details for the accounts of employees of the company Sun Microsystems, Mitnick could not resist the temptation to go further. He got administrator rights for their network and got to the server with the source code of the latest SunOS operating system. Then his social engineering skills came into play: posing as a technical support employee, Kevin convinced the company employee to accept this source code, write it to a suitable medium and leave it at the checkpoint for the "courier".

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At some point during Kevin's wanderings around the Sun Microsystems network and copying anything interesting from it, the administrators and security guys realized that someone was wandering around the system. They even figured out that the hacker was using social engineering, assumed that it was That Very Kevin Mitnick, and took a number of precautions. This only led to Mitnick starting to behave more cautiously, but by that time he was walking around their network as if he was at home and was quietly laughing, reading the correspondence about how he had been weaned off the Sun Microsystems system. One of the employees even received a thank you note on the wall for saving the company's network and defeating Kevin Mitnick - which, however, never actually happened.

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Feeling the excitement and impunity, Mitnick went further. He targeted Novell and its network operating system NetWare: including because, according to rumors, everything was very cool with information security there - and it was all the more interesting for him to hack them. After the first successes in obtaining access passwords up to administrators, the scythe met a stone: when trying to get to the server with the NetWare source code, social engineering did not work, the employees quickly realized that a hacker was calling them under the guise of colleagues, the security service took measures. After several attempts, Kevin managed to get some of the files through some less cautious employees, but attempts to get the OS source code only ran into a wall of suspicion and security protocols. Moreover, Mitnick began to suspect that his voice was being recorded and could be used for new legal charges.

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To improve his capabilities, Mitnick decided to switch from an upgraded but already outdated Novatel PTR-825 phone to the latest cool Motorola MicroTAC Ultra Lite model. But in order to turn an ordinary "mobile" into a secure tool for hacker manipulations and bypassing the system on bends, he needed the source code of the phone's software. Kevin began calling the company's offices and employees under the guise of an engineer from the Motorola R&D department in Arlington Heights, Illinois. And in this case, luck was on the hacker's side: in just a couple of calls, he ran into a naive young lady replacing her boss, who had gone on vacation, who did not suspect anything and was even so kind as to convince the wary security officers to allow him to send the latest version of the source code.

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There was one problem: Mitnick made this call from a street payphone, having rushed out of the office and assuming that it would take more than one call and more than one day; it was a sharply continental Colorado winter outside, and while he was explaining to the young lady what FTP was and how to archive files, he managed to freeze to death. But Kevin was jubilant: according to him, he felt like a CIA officer who managed to recruit an agent in the Iranian embassy under the guise of a representative of a third country. Knowing our hero, you could already guess what happened next: Mitnick got brazen and decided to get into Motorola servers seriously and for a long time. In short, he decided - and did it. In the most brazen way. The company's employees, unlike the savvy Novell staff, were easily led by the most primitive social engineering and after a couple of polite phrases were ready to almost vouch for a random interlocutor in front of their own colleagues.

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Kevin Mitnick let his guard down again, got carried away... and made mistakes again. At one not-so-great moment for him, he discovered that the administrator of Colorado Internet provider Colorado Supernet - on whose servers the hacker most brazenly stored his loot in the form of code borrowed from corporations - was monitoring his activities, including attempts to break into Novell and hiding pieces of NetWare source code on servers. And worse, he was concerned about what was happening to a certain FBI agent from Colorado Springs.

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Mitnick, instead of immediately leaving Colorado and lying low, decided to have some fun and make fun of his enemies. First, he fabricated a fake registration file with data on his actions that did not actually take place, and sent it to the FBI under the guise of that same admin. Then he found an insufficiently cautious employee in one of Novell's offices, used social engineering to get into their network again and stole the source code of the latest operating system. At some point, he realized with his sixth sense that his actions were being tracked. Then, as the sacramental cherry on the cake, he couldn't resist writing: "I know you're watching me, but you'll never catch me." Later, Novell's security staff would tell him that they had indeed been reading his actions and were pretty freaked out at that moment.

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After that, Kevin decided it would be a good idea to leave Novell alone... and switched to Nokia. Specifically, he decided to get the source code for the newest Nokia 121 phone. Now he had to call Finland, but Mitnick was already in no hurry. However, it turned out that the Finns from the Finnish office did not speak English very well: they had difficulty understanding Kevin, and Kevin - their attempts to express themselves in the language of Shakespeare. After several fruitless attempts, Mitnick howled and tried to switch to the British office of the company. It was better there, but only partially: the employee he managed to contact had a very pronounced British accent, and even with dialectisms, and Mitnick, who had previously only communicated with Americans, had to make a lot of effort to understand English by ear. The security measures in the British office were very primitive, so Kevin managed to download the source code of the Nokia 101 and Nokia 121 to the Colorado servers without any problems.

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Mitnick decided to go further again. He was interested in the source code of the latest phone under development under the working code HD760. But then a problem arose: the Finnish company's security team realized that something was wrong and blocked the upload of files from their servers via FTP. Social engineering came into play, and Kevin was lucky again: he found a trusting lead developer with good English in the office in Oulu, Finland, who was so kind that he agreed to download the code, write it to a magnetic medium and send it to the Nokia office in Largo, Florida. Where Mitnick was going to pick it up himself or through one of his trusted friends.

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However, when Mitnick started calling Largo and asking if the package had arrived, he was clearly being frozen on the line under various pretexts. He realized that they were stalking him again and trying to figure out the location of the outgoing call. Kevin turned to his friend Lewis, who came up with nothing better than to call Largo on behalf of none other than the head of Nokia's American branch, Karri-Pekka Wilska, demanding that they urgently send him a package. His pseudo-Finnish accent did not convince anyone, and the employees immediately reported the strange call to the FBI. It would seem that it was time to slow down, but Kevin and Lewis were stamping their hooves and were eager to get the source code at any cost.

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Lewis called the Largo office again as Wilsk and instructed them to send the package to the front desk of the Ramada Inn, not far from Lewis's office. When the package arrived, Kevin called the hotel and asked if it was there. The receptionist kept him on the cold shoulder for several minutes, and the hacker's suspicions grew. When the call was over, Mitnick called the hotel manager and introduced himself as... FBI Special Agent Wilson. The manager practically clicked his heels and obediently reported that the hotel was under the full control and surveillance of the police and the FBI's White Collar Crime Unit. At that moment, a police officer entered the manager's office, and Mitnick, insolent, demanded that he report the situation.

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Kevin and Lewis were ready to storm the ill-fated hotel to get to the coveted code. For them, it was already a matter of excitement and self-respect as Very Cool Hackers. But they had to back down. Out of anger, Mitnick went to hack the Japanese-American company NEC in search of the source code of cell phones. Well, he hacked it. He uploaded the results to the servers of the University of Southern California. It took a special effort to get the code for the newest NEC P7 mobile phone: to get it, Mitnick, following Lewis's footsteps, called the company's office under the guise of a Very Important Japanese Man from the central office in Tokyo. With a heavy pseudo-Japanese accent. Oddly enough, this time everything worked out. Oh, the naive 90s.

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Kevin became so brazen that he agreed to give a sensational interview about himself to Playboy magazine, not without precautions, of course. However, all this did not go unnoticed. The FBI was literally besieged by angry representatives of corporations with demands to find the damn hackers who were stealing the source codes of their latest products. No one believed that one unbridled adventurer could do this simply out of love for art and self-affirmation: they suspected industrial espionage on the part of competitors, and mentally calculated billions of losses in horror. Mitnick began to understand the scale of the problem when, during another hack on the servers of the University of Southern California, he discovered correspondence about his actions between the administrator Asbed Bedrosyan and the FBI.

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As it turned out later, in 1994, Attorney General David Schindler held a secret meeting with representatives of the affected corporations about what was happening. They were all extremely outraged, suspicious of each other, and initially refused to talk publicly about their own leaks. However, in the process of work, law enforcement officers and managers came to the conclusion that the handwriting was quite characteristic and most likely pointed to a very specific culprit: Kevin Mitnick, one of the most dangerous hackers in the United States, who was on the run. However, the company representatives still refused to believe that Mitnick was doing all this out of interest, and not to resell the loot to competitors for large sums as part of some kind of cunning game.

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Then, in the spring of 1994, Mitnick was suddenly fired from his job. His department was taken over by a stern new boss who wanted to impose some discipline. She thought Kevin was staying at work suspiciously late and chatting on the phone—meaning he was using his work time to work outside the company with his private clients. The funny thing is that Mitnick did do a lot of illegal and even unauthorized work, but he didn’t do any private work. Unlike his colleague, who was fired along with him for the same thing, but deservedly so. Mitnick had a bit of a row during the firing process, and then became paranoid that his angry ex-boss would dig into his background and find out that his entire identity as Eric Weiss from Oregon was a fake.

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With the help of a now former colleague, Kevin managed to quietly hack the company's network from the outside, erase all potentially dangerous files and traces on his former computer, and at the same time stick his nose into his boss's correspondence. As it turned out, the management had no serious suspicions against him, and all that the management cared about was that the fired employee would not start legal proceedings. Kevin, of course, was not going to sue. However, the problem arose where no one expected it. The higher management considered that the unsubstantiated accusation of "Eric" working for third-party clients left too much scope for a lawsuit - and decided to dig deeper to find more significant screw-ups in the fired employee. Well, in the process of finding out, they discovered what Mitnick feared: no Eric Weiss in the form in which he was known in the company existed. Just like the previous place of work indicated in the resume.

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Kevin was astonished when his former colleague told him about this. He immediately made up an excuse and said that he was an undercover private detective, after which he cut off all contact. Mitnick really liked Denver, he fought the temptation for a while to simply move to another part of it under a new name, but in the end he rightly decided that he had already exposed his face too much here, and it was risky. In addition, the Playboy journalist working on the interview reported that gentlemen in civilian clothes from the FBI came to him and were very interested in where the main character of the upcoming publication might be.

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So Eric Weiss was dead - now the pre-prepared Brian Merrill had to be born, who in fact died as an infant in a car accident many years ago, but left behind a bureaucratic trail.

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Content:
Part 9: Seattle Fog, Suspense, and a Black Helicopter
Part 10: Cyber Samurai Goes Hunting
Part 11: Through the eyes of an insulted hunter
Part 12: In the tightening ring of the hunt
Part 13: Hacker in the Embrace of the System

Part 9: Seattle Fog, Suspense, and a Black Helicopter​


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So, due to an idiotic set of circumstances, Kevin Mitnick - who for once really wasn't guilty in any way - was fired from his job, deprived of the false identity of Eric Weiss , and was forced to urgently flee from his beloved Denver. He had to find a new place to live and finally officially become in the eyes of the state and society not Kevin Mitnick, but Brian Merrill. Everything was ready for this, there was little left: to settle down somewhere where there is a demand for IT specialists, and try not to attract unnecessary attention to himself with new risky hacker adventures. If with the first in the USA in the mid-90s everything was fine and varied, then Kevin was absolutely incapable of the second: he was drawn to other people's servers and secrets no less than an Irish drunkard to a bottle of whiskey. But Lady Fortune does not like it very much when her favor is tested time after time in the most presumptuous manner.

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The Denver office building where Mitnick worked and the house (center) where he rented an apartment in 1993-1994.

The first thing Mitnick needed to do, however, was get out of Denver as soon as possible, before his former colleagues, stunned by the revelations, put the police and the FBI agents, who had been searching for him for months, on his tail. In addition, shortly before the disclosure, he was informed that the agents had again started going around to his friends and asking where the dangerous hacker Kevin Mitnick could be. He rushed to Vegas, where his mother and grandmother lived: it was risky, he himself knew from prison experience that many people end up behind bars out of a desire to see their relatives at all costs, but he could not do anything about it. His life had once again gone downhill, and Kevin needed to talk to people he could trust unconditionally.

He organized the meeting with his relatives, however, in the best traditions of spy thrillers, habitually using radio interception of all known frequencies of law enforcement agencies and related departments, which the police and agents used precisely to avoid interception of their communications by criminals. True, there was a nuance: by that time, communications between American security forces were usually encrypted, and Mitnick could not crack their encryption. Therefore, he resorted to a cunning trick, assembled equipment and arranged a natural electronic warfare war with the police and the FBI in Vegas. Within a radius of a couple of blocks from himself, he jammed their coded communications with interference so that eventually they spat and switched to open communication, cursing the Motorola encryption system. Well, Kevin listened and found out that no one was hunting him yet.

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After taking a breather, he began to think about where exactly he should go now in search of a new home under a new name. Most of all, he wanted to go to Silicon Valley - but it is located near San Francisco, in the state of California, and the local FBI department would be very happy with the option “Mitnick himself came”.

However, on the West Coast, there was another rapidly developing and promising center of digital technologies: the rainy and foggy capital of grunge and proto-hipsters, snobbish and progressive Seattle, Washington. It was there that many key offices of Microsoft and other corporations were located, and Mitnick decided that he would be able to perfectly disappear there and build a new life. In addition, Seattle in the mid-90s was known for its noticeable Thai diaspora and the widespread distribution of Thai cuisine, which Kevin simply adored. It was also largely from Seattle that the fashion for stylish coffee shops came - and Mitnick really liked good coffee too.

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Downtown Seattle in the 90s

Having weighed the pros and cons, our hacker-fugitive got on a train and headed northwest under the name Brian Merrill: who died as an infant in a car accident in the quiet state of South Dakota, and whose data Kevin managed to get from a very conservative and almost rural office of the local statistical service. Kevin wanted to burn all the documents in Weiss's name, but in the end he simply hid them well in a suitcase in case of any emergency. Mitnick arrived in Seattle in the evening, checked into a motel and passed out almost immediately. And the next morning - exactly on July 4, 1994, on US Independence Day, he received an urgent message from his mother: "read the New York Times!"

Indeed, The New York Times published an article "Cybercriminal Number One: Hacker Eludes FBI" by journalist John Markoff. The author literally mocked the inability of the mighty Federal Bureau of Investigation to catch Mitnick, and his capabilities and sins were described literally on an apocalyptic scale: supposedly, he even hacked the computers of the North American aerospace defense system NORAD, and almost started a global nuclear war! Of course, Mitnick had to hack the servers of US military facilities - but he never got to this. Moreover, the strategically important NORAD networks are completely isolated from the outside Internet, and it is technically impossible to hack them from outside the well-guarded military facilities.

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NORAD Strategic Command Center in the depths of Cheyenne Mountain

Mitnick realized that this article, where he was called no less than the most dangerous hacker in the United States, would not only attract unnecessary attention to his person, including random passers-by and potential colleagues, but would also infuriate those comrade majors from the California FBI department who, in fact, were supposed to catch him. As he found out later, in many ways this sensational nonsense was the result of the journalist’s communication with his former acquaintances, some of whom decided to embellish the reality a little, and some to get back at the fugitive for past grievances.

One thing was encouraging: the attached photo was very old, six years old, in it Mitnick was still very fat, shaved and with a short haircut, while at the time of the summer of 1994, Kevin, who had become hooked on a healthy lifestyle and had grown a beard, looked diametrically opposite. It was possible to recognize him from this photo, and in jackal quality (prison photography and newspaper printing), but it would take some effort. And yet, just in case, from that moment on our hero began to constantly wear dark glasses - which looked especially strange in Seattle, a city not just northern, but the cloudiest of the large cities in the United States. He explained to his surprised interlocutors that he constantly worked on the computer at night, and therefore his eyes began to perceive even diffused daylight poorly.

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Having taken another breath, Mitnick found housing not far from the local university. However, his Californian experience let him down: if the areas of Los Angeles and Frisco universities were usually quite decent, beautiful and picturesque, then the area around the University of Washington was more reminiscent of the depressive landscapes from the movie "Robocop". But the housing there was cheap, landlords were not too interested in the details of the tenant's personality and biography, and nearby there was a free YMCA gym and an authentic Thai restaurant with proper food. Kevin even tried to hit on a local Thai waitress, and she demonstrated mutual interest, but he was stopped by paranoia, the fear of blabbing in a close relationship.

Kevin got a job at the Virginia Mason Medical Center - an even more no-nonsense no-nonsense person than at a law firm in Denver. Working in the hospital's tech support was frankly boring, and the management melancholically kicked around all of Mitnik's rationalization proposals on how to fix, improve, secure, upgrade, make something faster and more efficient. Worse, despite the city's overall progressiveness and IT-ness, it was often necessary to deal with people who were completely ignorant in terms of computer literacy. I'm afraid to imagine what Kevin said about himself and others when one of the clinic employees who contacted tech support complained that he could not remove data from a floppy disk, literally photocopying it. With a photocopier. A floppy disk. Yes.

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Mitnick was bored. And when Mitnick was bored, he did what he found most interesting: hacking and extracting other people's data. Soon after settling in Seattle, he found a new target: DEC's VMS operating system. To get to the coveted data, he pretended to be a company employee and contacted Neil Clift, a man who looked for vulnerabilities in VMS and reported them to DEC, and with whom he had already dealt during the Nokia hacks. Mitnick managed to gain access and learn almost all the vulnerabilities of the VMS system, but at one point he could not answer a question about the password encryption algorithm in the system - and got caught. Neil realized that instead of Derrell, it was Mitnick, whom they had met several years earlier, who was dealing with him, and addressed Kevin directly as Kevin.

Despite all his paranoia, Mitnick agreed to a phone conversation - naturally, through a cleverly modernized mobile and a random alien number - and had more than one long, friendly and fascinating conversation with Clift on technical topics. To Kevin's surprise, he was not offended by him for the problems with Nokia and communication with the Finnish police, and even gave him a lot of useful advice on hacker work - from the experience and optics of a vulnerability search specialist. However, Mitnick soon found out, having hacked the correspondence, that at the same time he was no less friendly and active in communicating with FBI Special Agent Caitlin Carson from California, who was handling his case, and told her in detail about his conversations with the hacker. Now it was Mitnick's turn not to be offended: he decided that he himself was an evil Pinocchio, and in general, he was the first to fool Clift.

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Months passed in Seattle. Neither the FBI nor the state police showed any obvious interest in our hero. Mitnick relaxed again, enthusiastically contacted other hackers and continued to break and mine everything he could get his hands on. Hacker Ron Olson helped him get into a closed California car registration database. Together with a Dutch hacker nicknamed RGB, Kevin managed to penetrate the holy of holies of US information security: the data of the CERT (computer emergency response team), a federal anti-hacker task force for rapid response to computer security breaches with its central office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was created in 1988 after a worm by graduate student Morris managed to knock out 10% of the Internet nodes, and it became clear that hackers could pose a threat to national security. However, Mitnick and RGB got into it not just for the love of art: their goal was to get access to the latest data on vulnerabilities that had not yet been published in the official bulletin of the organization for a quick fix. Which they did, and were very happy about it.

However, in October 1994, Mitnick's quiet hacker life in Seattle was disrupted by a strange incident. One lunchtime, Kevin went out, actually, for lunch - and discovered the sound of a helicopter. Nothing special for Seattle, the largest metropolis in the American Northwest, but the sound began to approach. The helicopter literally hovered over the street not far from Mitnick, who was walking down the street, and began to follow him. Having laid bricks on a small office center, Kevin began to loop through the alleys and shops - but the helicopter stubbornly found him again and again. He was terrified and literally felt like a character in a thriller.

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Finally, Mitnick figured out how to turn off the phone — and finally, those who were in the helicopter lost him. After sitting under a tree and catching his breath, he found a way to contact his father, but his father laughed at him and advised him to treat his nerves. Kevin's paranoia intensified again — and there was every reason for it. Alas, for him this was only the first act of great trouble. Soon after, Mitnick was fired from the clinic — on the grounds that "you are clearly bored here," he did not fight for a job, because he really was very bored there and sometimes butthurt from the idiocy of the management and users.

Well, when Kevin went to the 24-hour Kinko's post office not far from his rented apartment to write a few fake resumes, print them out and send them to companies that interested him — voices began to come from the security forces' frequencies from the radio scanner he usually had with him. The voices indicated that some kind of operation was unfolding in the area, during which someone was being searched for. However, everything ended with the phrase "we're coming in," but no agents pounced on him. Having fiddled with the resume until midnight, Kevin headed home - but decided not to rush, but to observe the apartment from the side. When he went out onto the familiar street, it became clear that something was wrong: the window was not lit, although he had a habit of leaving the light on, including to avoid theft. Had the light bulb burned out, or?..

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There was a truck parked outside the house, and a couple was kissing in the cab. Deciding that it would be paranoid to think that they were under surveillance by the FBI or the police (oh, really, it was too much), Kevin approached them and asked if they had seen his friend there, who was supposedly supposed to be waiting for him. They said they hadn't, but they had seen some people carrying some boxes out of the house. The suspense was growing. More and more signs indicated that someone had come for him .

Overcoming his fear, Mitnick went into the house and ran up the stairs to his landlord's apartment. The landlord, sleepy and angry, said that the cops had kicked down the door to Kevin's apartment, left a business card, and told him to tell the tenant to call the number immediately. He immediately asked when Kevin would pay for the broken door. He promised to call the police and pay for the damage as soon as possible, flew down the stairs and spent some time creeping around in terror through dark alleys, trying to spot surveillance and a raiding party. There seemed to be no one there. Besides, according to the landlord, it was the cops who came, not the feds, which meant they probably weren't after the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick.

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He didn't risk going into the apartment, where everything had been taken anyway: he suspected that even regular cops could have left someone there to meet the suspect. Mitnick had only a backpack with a minimum of things, which he always carried with him just in case, and a briefcase with documents, including completely illegal blank forms borrowed from a sleepy office in South Dakota. He was in a cold sweat, and only by an effort of will did he force himself to walk along the night streets at a normal gait, without breaking into a run. After a couple of blocks, Kevin realized that he was having a panic attack. The last thing he managed to do was go into a lively night bar, where everyone was drinking and having fun, and hide in the farthest toilet stall.

Having gradually regained his ability to think, Kevin headed downtown and rented a motel room in the name of Eric Weiss, whose documents he had conveniently not liquidated before arriving in Seattle. Then he took his clothes from the laundry, which he had conveniently given there so as not to be left in only what he had on: jeans, a jacket, and a T-shirt with the Hard Rock inscription. The cops took almost everything from his apartment, even his laptop, which he had not taken with him, since the post office had its own computers, and a bunch of disks and magnetic tapes, where he had been uploading a large number of files stolen from other people's databases for several years. Having calmed down even more, Mitnick decided at all costs to find out: what exactly were the cops' complaints about him, and with what probability would they start digging through his files, or would his equipment and storage media simply gather dust in the evidence warehouse?

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Social engineering and the help of an old friend of Lewis came into play. With all their efforts and brains, they managed to quickly hack the system - and find out what was going on from the police point of view. As it turned out, the cops had no idea that they were dealing with Kevin Mitnick. The employees of the Cellular Fraud Unit detected suspicious phone calls from different numbers coming from the said apartment and decided that some self-taught phreaker was using technical tricks to make free calls in order to avoid paying the phone operator. An offense - yes, and even an interesting one for the cops, who even used a helicopter to search for the "Kulibin" on the streets of Seattle, but nothing really serious.

This is one of the reasons why they did not even record the conversations in which Kevin chatted a lot of very, very personal things, but only recorded the fact of suspicious and clearly illegal connections. And that is why, instead of organized surveillance and capture, they limited themselves to confiscating things and leaving the landlord a business card: they thought that the self-taught programmer would get scared and come running to the police himself with a confession. However, Mitnick had no intention of surrendering. Having collected his things, he took a Greyhound to Tacoma, and from there by train through Portland he again headed south.

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He didn't know yet that the troubles in the inhospitable foggy Seattle were just a demo of what was waiting for him further on the dangerous road of a hacker on the run. In addition to the FBI agents, he will have a personal enemy - who will play a very dramatic role in his life. But more about that in the next part.

Part 10: Cyber Samurai Goes Hunting​


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Foggy Seattle, which was supposed to be a safe haven for Mitnick, turned out to be a dangerous trap for him . He was followed on radio frequencies and from a helicopter, he miraculously avoided arrest - only because the local cops did not immediately understand who they were dealing with, and lazily wanted to teach a lesson to the "impudent self-taught student". However, almost all of Kevin's things ended up in the police, and he himself, literally with only what he had on him, was forced to flee from Washington State to his native and familiar, but full of traps, southern California. However, the fox of the world wide web managed to dodge the trap that was ready to snap shut - and intended to not let himself be caught by either the regular police or the FBI agents. And everything would be fine, Kevin was used to hiding - but soon Mitnick would have a personal enemy. In the best traditions of 90s cyberpunk, it will be a Japanese man named Tsutomu Shimomura, a cyber samurai obsessed with catching the elusive hacker for reasons of personal revenge.

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The Seattle house where Mitnick lost most of his belongings after a police raid

Mitnick first encountered Tsutomu Shimomura, according to his statements, in September 1993, when he was trying to get the source code for the SunOS operating system from Sun Microsystems. In the process of searching for them, Kevin hacked a host at the University of California, San Diego, where Shimomura was already working, got himself administrator rights, built in a network traffic analyzer, and literally sat on Shimomura's servers for several days - until he discovered the penetration and blocked access. Tsutomu took this embarrassment as a personal insult and tried for some time to figure out who hacked the university servers, but at that time, unsuccessfully.

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It is worth noting that Mitnick and Shimomura sincerely did not like each other, and their testimonies about each other in terms of fuckups, character traits and ethically questionable actions should be taken with a grain of salt.

The second time, according to Kevin, their remote meeting took place during Kevin's stay in Seattle. Once Mitnick decided to slightly rob the hacker Mark Lottor, who was already under investigation, from whom he hoped to borrow the source codes and methods for taking control of OKI 900 and OKI 1150 cell phones. Mitnick hacked the workstation of his girlfriend Lily, who worked at Sun Microsystems, got to Lottor's machine through it, and was surprised to find that the hacker did not have the source code, he recreated it using reverse engineering. And he was helped in this - a hacker who was literally awaiting trial for complicity in the activities of the famous hacker Kevin Poulsen, not even hiding much, by the famous cybersecurity expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick was very interested in this, and he thought about how to hack Shimomura's own servers and properly rummage through them in search of something interesting - but just at that moment the cops caught his lair, and Kevin had to urgently flee the state.

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Hackers Adrian Lamo, Kevin Mitnick, and Kevin Poulsen in 2001, from the archive of Adrian Lamo (by that time he was the only active hacker, while Mitnick and Poulsen had already settled their problems with the law and settled down)

The aforementioned Tsutomu Shimomura (more often written Shimomura, but I support Polivanov's, not Hepburn's, transcription of Japanese hissing-whistling sounds) from the San Diego Supercomputer Center is in many ways no less remarkable than Mitnick himself. He was the grandson of an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who served in Manchuria during World War II, and the son of Osamu Shimomura, a famous biochemist who survived the nuclear attack on Nagasaki and won the 2008 Nobel Prize for the discovery and development of the use of green fluorescent protein. Tsutomu was born in 1964 in Nagoya and immigrated to Princeton, New Jersey, with his family at a young age. Unlike his father, who was passionate about marine biochemistry, he chose a technical path. Overcoming his violent and conflicting nature, which caused him many problems with studies and discipline in his teenage years, Tsutomu graduated from the California Institute of Technology, worked at Los Alamos, and in 1989 moved to San Diego and worked on supercomputing and computer security.

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Soon after, he became one of the best expert consultants for the US National Security Agency in the fight against hackers and cybercrime. If Mitnick was a vividly expressed character of American cyberpunk, a rebel hacker hiding from the system, then Tsutomu Shimomura was no less a typical example of a Japanese cyberpunk hero. He worked for the state with conviction, and even seeing many imperfections of the system, he preferred to act together with it and from within it. At the same time, in the spirit of the same Japanese cyberpunk, he was very philosophical about observing formal rules and even criminal legislation - when he did not see the expediency in this and had, so to speak, understanding from "comrade major":
He pulled out an AT&T cell phone, unpacked it, took it apart, and began listening to phone conversations going through Capitol Hill — while an FBI agent stood behind him and listened in (from Bruce Sterling's memoirs)
In his memoirs about the hunt for Mitnick, Shimomura openly emphasized that he had quarreled with FBI employees about their excessive, in his opinion, attention to compliance with procedures, laws and regulations: “a hacker should be in jail, and it doesn’t matter how exactly we put him there.”

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Shimomura's book about the hunt for Mitnick, co-authored in 1995 with journalist John Markoff

Tsutomu compensated for his loyalty and systematicity in terms of views and life strategy with the external style of not even a geek, but a complete slacker on the verge of punk. At repeated hearings in the US Congress on computer network and mobile communications security, he usually ignored the strict formal dress code and spoke in a T-shirt, sandals and worn jeans. Simply because he wanted and could afford it as an indispensable expert. Well, in general, Mitnick was not the only one who characterized Tsutomu as a person who was difficult to communicate with, "poisonous" with a samurai-like, painfully heightened sense of self-worth. In general, Shimomura took up the hunt for Mitnick precisely because of a feeling of acute resentment and a desire to take revenge at any cost. Now let's return to our fugitive and figure out how exactly he stepped on the touchy cyber samurai's sore spot.

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So the Greyhound bus from Seattle passed through Tacoma, Portland, almost the entire Pacific coast of the United States, and finally dropped Kevin off at the Los Angeles train station. He checked into a cheap motel, where he had to share a room with hordes of cockroaches. Still in a state of dark daze, severe stress, and incomplete sanity, he left the few things that remained with him, wandered around the city, and reached the Metro Plaza Hotel, the same one he had looked at for weeks from the narrow window of a solitary confinement cell in a federal detention center several years earlier. For the first time, Kevin considered turning himself in: there was too much irrefutable evidence of his hacking activity on the media seized by the police, the search for him would soon begin with tripled intensity - including taking into account the scandalous article by John Markoff in the NYT, which ridiculed the FBI's inability to catch the famous Mitnick - and he was terribly tired of running and hiding, and was completely exhausted, especially after what he had experienced in Seattle. If he turned himself in, he thought, maybe the court would be more favorable to him?

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Using his cell phone tricks, Kevin managed to meet his father and ex-wife Bonnie. Both were very upset and concerned about his life situation, his pale appearance in every sense, and his mental state - but they did not know how to help, and he himself did not really understand what he could ask for so as not to harm the few remaining loved ones. Then Mitnick moved to Vegas, where he lay low for a while with the help of his faithful mother and grandmother. Thanks to their care and temporary relative safety, he was able to breathe a little, collect his brains and build a preliminary plan of further action. He did not want to give up anymore. And he wanted a new formal identity for himself, and not from the already scorched in the eyes of South Dakota law enforcement. Using his usual methods, he began to accumulate documents in the name of a certain Michael David Stanfill, a graduate of the University of Portland in Oregon: he created a certified birth certificate, a fake W-2 form (data on wages and taxes paid) and a driver's license, which, according to established practice in the United States, largely serves as an internal passport. True, there was almost a hitch with the license: Kevin went to get a "duplicate" in the town of Pahrump, so as not to run into someone who had seen him get a license in the name of Eric Weiss in the same Vegas two years earlier. And he managed to get to the very employee who served him at the time - he moved to Pahrump.

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Mitnick was saved from a dangerous embarrassment only by his quick wit and social skills: he was the first to feign recognition and ask if he went to the same local supermarket. The employee fell for the fake version of an acquaintance, and the potential incident was exhausted. Having received the documents, Kevin did not linger in Nevada and decided to move further east of the country: where they would be less likely to look for him than in the west, where he had already left a lot of traces. Along the way, taking with him skis and skiing gear that he had conveniently left with his mother in Vegas, he spent some time in November 1994 at one of the small resorts in the Rocky Mountains near his beloved Denver. He exhaled even more, relaxed, calmed down ... and decided to return to the idea of hack the famous cybersecurity expert Tsutomu Shimomura.

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Mitnick told his good friend on IRC, an Israeli hacker with the nickname JSZ, about how he had run into Shimomura twice. The Israeli specialized in hacking corporate networks in search of source codes for operating systems and all sorts of useful utilities, and he skillfully left well-disguised backdoors after hacking - in case he wanted to come back and was too lazy to hack again. Mitnick also loved, knew how and practiced this, and they enthusiastically talked about their adventures - that's why he shared stories about Tsutomu with JSZ. JSZ, in turn, shared a secret: he and his colleagues in the dangerous business managed to write a utility for hacking systems using IP spoofing, which almost no one had protection against at the time. He kindly shared the code with Kevin. And then, in honor of Hanukkah, at the turn of November and December 1994, he suddenly informed Mitnick that he had already hacked Shimomura for him. And he gave his friend free access to any data on his servers at the University of San Diego.

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Mitnick was delighted with the gift - and he wanted not only to copy the files from Tsutomu, but to demonstratively slap the nose of the "famous cybersecurity expert" who helped the NSA and FBI catch hackers and prevent them from hacking everything and everyone. This desire, according to Mitnick, was exacerbated by Tsutomu's reputation in the computer community as an arrogant and overly self-confident person. He rushed to the hotel room, immediately got into the servers in San Diego, and JSZ took literally everything that was in Shimomura's folders. The stolen file, a whopping 140 MB (remember, it was 1994), was uploaded in several copies to servers in different countries - including, also as an act of hooliganism, Mitnick saved one of the copies in the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link' system under the hacked account of journalist John Markoff - the same one who published an article in the NYT that was dangerous for him (and who would later become Tsutomu's co-author in a literary description of the hunt for Mitnick). Then they logged out of the system, and JSZ carefully covered up the traces of the hack.

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While studying Shimomura's correspondence - the two hackers also took out everything they could find - Mitnick was surprised to discover that Tsutomu had been actively communicating with Markoff since at least 1991, and that they had already been discussing him, the dangerous data hacker Kevin Mitnick, and how to get the better of him. Kevin immersed himself in studying Shimomura's data for many hours and days, finding, in his words, a lot of interesting things - including, for example, the code of eavesdropping programs written for the US Air Force security services. And Tsutomu himself very soon discovered that someone had been hacking it. Mitnick and JSZ had successfully hacked it using a new approach that cybersecurity experts were just beginning to discuss - but they had not noticed a number of well-hidden utilities that recorded everything that happened on Shimomura's servers and regularly sent him full logs. To say that Tsutomu was blown away by the brazen raid would be to understate his reaction. He now wanted the head of the hacker who had done this. Or at least to see him put behind bars, and he was willing to do whatever it took to help that happen in any way he could. He spoke to his NSA handlers, contacted the FBI, and offered to collaborate. After comparing all the available data, the task force that formed concluded that the most likely culprit was Kevin Mitnick, who was on the run and had already made a splash in Seattle. For Tsutomu, Kevin, whom he had previously despised as an “irresponsible crook and data thief,” had become a personal enemy.

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Meanwhile

, Kevin really wanted to stay in Denver longer, but he thought it was too unsafe (at the same time, he was okay with breaking Shimomura). He had to decide where to go next. It definitely had to be somewhere east of Denver and away from the West Coast, where he had left too many traces, but what exactly? Options included Austin, Texas, where computer companies were actively developing, or Manhattan, New York - “just because it’s Manhattan, damn it!” However, the final choice was quite unexpected, especially for a Californian hacker geek: Raleigh, the capital of the state of North Carolina. Northern - but already typically Southern in many ways. Conservatism, religiosity, reverence for the memory of the slave-owning Confederacy, emphasized traditionalism and provincialism in the good and bad senses of the word. However, Raleigh was already part of the Research Triangle Park, where there was a noticeable demand for IT specialists - and Mitnick hoped that there would be no particular problems with finding a job in his field. Kevin got on the train to enjoy the leisurely ride across half the country and the views from the window, and soon he was already enjoying the "southern hospitality" - not in the sense of the thriller of the same name and memes about rednecks, he really liked the southerners for their sociability, openness, readiness for mutual assistance and philosophical attitude to the "dreary northern formalities."

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He settled in a rented house in a picturesque suburb with lakes, and in parallel with the search for work... began to hack Motorola servers. He had already done this in Seattle, and managed to get the source codes of operating systems - but in order to frequently and successfully reflash phones for himself to bypass the very likely surveillance, he still needed compilers. Using the IP spoofing method he had already mastered thanks to JSZ, he hacked the system that was developing the Intermetrics compiler - but did not find a single compiler there. Surprised, he used social engineering methods and contacted one of the employees responsible for them, posing as a top management representative, requesting compiler files "for a presentation to management." The employee first asked Mitnick a whole bunch of control questions - which he was able to answer thanks to his advance study of the company's structure. And then he confided that the files had been temporarily moved from the servers to offline storage devices at the request of the FBI. Because, according to the Cybercrime Department, a certain extremely dangerous hacker was supposed to come for them, who “has already hacked not only Motorola and obtained the OS source code, but also the CIA to a top secret level of access, and he almost wipes his feet on the FBI.” However, the employee was so kind and so concerned about the need to “urgently show the latest edits to the boss” that he personally handed over the hidden compilers to Mitnick via FTP.

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However, very soon Mitnick realized that the strange behavior of the company employee and the FBI was only the first bell. And before, he had not had tsores (troubles), but a solid marzipan, as they said in old Odessa. Now they were taking him seriously. Already during the conversation with the employee, he was alarmed by the fact that only a very smart specialist could figure out about compilers, not an ordinary FBI agent, even from the newly created department for combating hackers. The next morning, the landline phone in the rented house was blocked - and it turned out that the number was blocked, since the telephone company had reason to believe that the tenant was not Michael Stanfill from Portland. Having lied and tried to prove that this was a mistake, Kevin realized that it was time to urgently get out of the newly rented apartment. And urgently, for the umpteenth time, change his name and documents, and now in a completely unfamiliar city and state.

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Mitnick decided to initially pose as a certain Glenn Thomas Case, also a graduate of the University of Portland, from which he had previously managed to obtain a database of graduates. After thinking about it, he decided to slightly change it to John Thomas Case to confuse the hunters when they could check the names against the databases. The experience of "ostapobenderstvo" did not fail this time either: literally a few days later he had already acquired an official copy of the "lost" birth certificate, and then a driver's license under the new name - fortunately, the customs in the South were more old-fashioned than in California or Nevada, and suspecting every person you met (white) of foul play was considered bad form by many. Kevin rented a cheaper place to live, and was soon frustrated by another piece of news: his fellow hobbyist and namesake Kevin Poulsen was put in the same temporary detention center in Los Angeles that he had been several years earlier. Mitnick was so triggered by this news that he felt he was literally obliged to put the system in an interesting position and, bypassing all security measures, call the prisoner with words of support. He used all his knowledge of social engineering and experience of serving time - and managed to establish telephone (!) contact with Poulsen under the guise of a lawyer handling his case. Since then, the two hackers, previously not personally acquainted, began to be friends.

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Kevin Poulsen, who was considered by the FBI to be no less a dangerous hacker than Mitnick, including for hacking their own servers.

And at the end of January 1995, Kevin received a metaphorical gauntlet from Tsutomu Shimomura, a formal declaration of war. In the same New York Times, he found an article by John Markoff, where he talked about how a malicious hacker stole the data of the famous cybersecurity specialist Shimomura and placed it on a server under Markoff's account. Despite the irony of the situation and its even indecency for Tsutomu, the scale of the fuck-up was not hidden.
Mr. Shimomura is one of the most serious computer security experts in the country. It was he who advised the government's computer security agency to issue a dire warning on Monday. The agency said that unknown intruders had used sophisticated intrusion techniques to steal files from Mr. Shimomura's highly guarded computer, stealing them from his home near San Diego. Imagine thieves who decided to show off how clever they were by breaking into a locksmith's shop. In this case, the owner of the shop and the custodian of all the keys was Tsutomu Shimomura, who took the break-in as a personal affront. That's why solving the crime is now a matter of honor for him.

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Immediately following this publication, a press release from the US Department of Justice was published and widely covered in the media, officially announcing the start of a major hunt for Mitnick:
Washington, D.C., USA, January 26, 1995 — The U.S. Marshals Service is on the trail of a computer hacker who is on the run after being convicted in one case and indicted in another. Authorities say they are trying to locate Kevin Mitnick, 31, of Sepulveda, California. Deputy U.S. Marshal Kathleen Cunningham told Newsbytes that the U.S. Marshals Service has had a warrant out for Mitnick’s arrest for a parole violation since November 1992. The hacker was also nearly caught in Seattle last October. Cunningham said Mitnick is an amateur radio enthusiast who is believed to use a scanner to monitor police communications in the area where he is hiding. “The local police had no radio security in place, so when Mitnick’s address was mentioned on the air, he left his home. However, he did not manage to take anything." Mitnick is believed to have exceptional skills in the field of computer takeover and the use of telecommunications systems. Mitnick is able to create false identification cards, and he also uses a computer.
The evening finally stopped being languid. But Mitnik was not going to give up.

Part 11: Through the Eyes of an Insulted Hunter​


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So, having once again eluded the FBI and only miraculously not been detained in Seattle, Kevin managed to get to his native California, once again change his identity, and through Vegas get to his beloved Denver and the ski resorts in the Rocky Mountains. This time, Colorado was supposed to be just a transit point on the way to the southern states on the East Coast, where Mitnick was going to start a new life. As always, our hero could not resist another hack - and in the company of an Israeli hacker with the nickname JSZ, using the latest and little-known method, he managed to get to the well-protected data of the famous cybersecurity specialist Tsutomu Shimomura. This turned out to be a mistake: an ambitious Japanese man, the son of a Nobel laureate, who is connected with the American intelligence services, took the hack as a personal insult and declared a vendetta against Kevin. No sooner had Mitnick reached North Carolina than he found the pursuit ring around him rapidly tightening, and the Federals who had previously watched his escape began to take him seriously.

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Tsutomu Shimomura in person

Actually, this part was originally supposed to describe the climax of the plot. However, your humble servant got his hands on a book by Shimomura and Markoff about the hunt for Kevin Mitnick (Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff, 1995) - and thanks to this, we will be able to change our point of view for a while, observing the approaching denouement of our story from the side of the "hunters". This is quite rare evidence, which is now not so easy to find not only in Russian, but also in English. It is worth noting that Mitnick and Shimomura were not on friendly terms with each other, both were not very objective in their assessment of the opponent's actions, and many points and statements from Tsutomu's book were questioned and criticized not only by Kevin and the journalist Jonathan Littman, who clearly sympathized with him (The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick, by Jonathan Littman, 1996), but also by other people and organizations.

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The confrontation between the "cybersecurity knight" Shimomura and the "evil hacker" Mitnick, according to Shimomura; according to Kevin, in the person of Tsutomu, he encountered an unprincipled and touchy eccentric with the letter M.

Shimomura believed - and, given Mitnick's own recollections, correctly - that he became the target of a hacker attack precisely because he was a well-known cybersecurity specialist. However, with the paranoia of a professional "security specialist", he suspected that the hacking and theft of his files was not just a joke or a demonstration of daring, but possible efforts by a certain criminal community of hackers to obtain his latest developments in hacking and protection from hacking - in order to create chaos on the network, smash corporate, scientific and government servers, and unrestrainedly steal data and money from accounts. Tsutomu was particularly upset about Mitnick hacking his files because at that very time he finally met his girlfriend Julia, who had returned from a highly spiritual trip to the Himalayan monasteries. They were relaxing in the Toad Hall mansion in the hilly part of San Francisco, which then served as a kind of commune for several well-paid computer scientists, spending time in the jacuzzi and just chilling - so Tsutomu almost did not go online at that time, which gave Mitnick and JSZ time for thoughtful hacking and downloading everything they found to external servers. However, if we are to believe Shimomura's memoirs, the couple not only enthusiastically cooed, but also discussed the deepening of Tsutomu's cooperation with the US NSA, which never happened at that time. About which Shimomura hissed and spat venom quite emotionally.

Shimomura does not hide in his memoirs that by that time he had already provided the National Security Agency, the main US intelligence agency engaged in electronic intelligence and counterintelligence in all forms, with various delicate services in the field of computer networks, their security, and overcoming it when necessary. And he even managed to burn out a little on this basis, in parallel with his main work at the Supercomputer Computing Center in San Diego. However, back in the early fall of 1994, he tried to negotiate with the NSA about providing him with a grant of 500,000 dollars to create a working group and conduct research in the field of cybersecurity in the interests of the NSA. However, then the "guys from Fort Meade" began to freeze Tsutomu, week after week not giving a clear answer. As a result, by the beginning of winter, the computer specialists he had previously selected for the project spat and went to other places. Shimomura was very angry at the NSA for the failed project and the grant he did not receive. While most hackers considered them to be literal servants of Satan and the embodiment of Big Brother overseeing the network (and, frankly, not without reason), Tsutomu saw them as "a large and incompetent organization, bound by countless rules that do not really mean either good or evil," and considered its employees "astonishingly incompetent, like the entire official bureaucracy."

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The NSA headquarters built in the 1980s in Fort Meade

The morning after the hack — the girl went to clear her head, but Shimomura never went online, he was just too lazy — Tsutomu drove south from Frisco, to Silicon Valley to talk to some computer geeks he knew in Palo Alto. On the way, he received a call from his colleague and friend Andrew, who was looking after the computers in his absence: he said that Shimomura had clearly been hacked, as indicated by the characteristic sign of an unexpected decrease in the size of the activity log file “erased” by the hackers, which was automatically monitored by a special utility. Tsutomu experienced the appropriate range of emotions, metaphorically extinguished the chair, threw out the bricks he had put aside, and rushed to sort out the situation — instructing Andrew to disconnect the computers from the network and not touch anything, so as not to erase possible evidence and traces. Twenty minutes later, he was in the town of Menlo Park, at the townhouse of his friend Mark Lottor, located across from the office of SRI International, where ARPANet technologies were developed. Yes, that same Mark Lottor, who was under investigation for hacking, and that same Mark Lottor from whom Kevin had extracted the source codes for the OKI 900 and OKI 1150 cell phones in October 1994, just before his rented apartment was searched. And just then, having figured out the files and who had written them during the reverse engineering of the source codes, Mitnick became interested in Shimomura and decided to get something from him too.

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John Markoff's WSJ article on how the elusive Mitnick, who had gone underground, was mocking the FBI, June 1994

So Shimomura connected to his resources from Mark's house via an outdated modem he had found by the way, and began to figure out what had happened. Feeling like a detective at a crime scene, he was convinced that there had been a break-in, and the hackers were trying to cover their tracks. At the same time, Andrew was digging through the files, and, to Tsutomu's fury, he was opening files and erasing the data about their last opening by the hackers. After explaining to his colleague his crooked… incomplete correctness of actions in the current situation, Shimomura found out that the files had not only been hacked, but also copied somewhere. It was also possible to find out that the hacking, at least partially, was carried out through the Colorado SuperNet provider, located, accordingly, in the state of Colorado - where, as we already know, Kevin "exhaled" in his beloved Denver on the transcontinental route from California to the American South. Tsutomu also found "traces of traces" of a file named oki.tar.Z, which was clearly related to the hacking and copying of his data: they literally collected everything related to the software of OKI mobile phones - with which both Tsutomu and Mark worked - through the Unix program Tar and additionally archived it. Considering that he had remotely found out everything he could, Tsutomu instructed Andrew to completely disconnect the computers from the network and wait for his arrival at the site in San Diego.

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The OKI 1150 mobile phone that caused the conflict between Mitnick and Shimomura

That same night, Tsutomu demonstrated that, despite all his loyalty and willingness to help the system fight violators, he himself since school sincerely did not give a damn about the rules when they stood in his way, for which, in particular, he was solemnly expelled from the elite school in Princeton almost before graduation (he actively helped school trolls and bullies in pranks at the level of "burning down toilets at the school stadium"). To conduct a detailed analysis of his data, he needed utilities that were lying on diskettes in the Sun Microsystems office. Not only was it late in the evening, the company was also closed for the Christmas holidays. Taking Mark with him, Tsutomu rushed to his acquaintance, an employee of the company, Lyle Elam, and from there, dressed as technical workers, to the office, which they had successfully and not very legally entered using Lyle's electronic pass. On the way, they did run into a security guard - but he recognized Lyle and Tsutomu, who had consulted the company more than once and worked in its office. However, the guard would hardly have shown as much understanding if he had seen them sneaking back around the cameras with a whole pile of bags stuffed with disks.

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Then Shimomura jumped on the first plane to San Diego. Now he was even more angry at the hackers: now he had to interrupt his legal vacation and give up his long-awaited vacation with Julia on mountain skiing at Lake Tahoe. Technically, the data could have been stored until his return on schedule - but what kind of vacation would that have been psychologically? Besides, Tsutomu still did not know how much and what the hackers had managed to download, and he was afraid that if something particularly interesting leaked to the hackers, he would have to take immediate action, including through the "sad bureaucrats" from the NSA. Soon he was already running into his office at the Center for Supercomputer Research at the University of California, where his machines were located, somewhat pretentiously named on the network in honor of the fallen angels from Milton's "Paradise Lost": Ariel, Osiris, Astarte, and so on. What worried Tsutomu most were the traces of the oki.tar.Z archive, since the files downloaded from the OKI phones indicated that Shimomura and Lottor themselves were not entirely legal in their reverse engineering of their software code - they initially tried to obtain it officially, but were denied, and other methods came into play. Even more touching was the fact that Tsutomu and Mark were making it not only for themselves, but also, as Shimomura himself evasively writes, as a "field diagnostic tool for mobile phone companies and government regulatory agencies." Simply put, with its help, the NSA could do various interesting and not entirely legal things with these very phones without notifying users and law enforcement agencies.

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A parody emblem of the US NSA, which, as numerous scandals show, is very fond of "just in case" and not very legally recording data of correspondence and conversations of both its own citizens and people outside the US.

Moreover, at a hearing in Congress in 1992, Tsutomu - having prudently received legal immunity - demonstrated in front of congressmen and an FBI representative who was also present how it works, taking a new phone from its factory packaging and turning it with a few manipulations into a device for remotely listening in on... the phones of the congressmen themselves. As he was leaving the hall, Shimomura was caught by an indignant FBI agent and given a preventive conversation in the genre of "if we catch you doing this outside of official cooperation with the state, you'll go to jail." Tsutomu pro forma promised not to do "that" - and, naturally, continued to do exactly that. Fortunately, the NSA's interest in cooperation is a good "roof" for an American hacker from unwanted attention from the FBI and the police. "No matter how much I worked with them, the FBI has absolutely no sense of humor," commented Shimomura, who despised formal rules and laws no less than Mitnick. And he loved to show it off in front of those who were supposed to ensure their observance - but could not hold Shimomura himself accountable for violating them due to, let's say, "some delicate circumstances."

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The NSA is not as well-known as the CIA and FBI, but its capabilities are superior in many ways, especially when it comes to cyberspace.

Tsutomu and Andrew, who had come to visit him, began to carefully study the contents of the computers disconnected from the network - in order not to erase anything, Shimomura removed the disks he was interested in and connected them to another computer in "read-only" mode. Along the way, he thought about who could have pulled off all this - and the identity of the suspect seemed quite obvious to him. He remembered well how in October Mark Lottor was hacked in search of the same source codes for OKI - and some unnamed "hack friend" soon told Mark that the hack was carried out by "Kevin Mitnick and his friends, and they are very unhappy that they did not manage to get what they were looking for." As far as one can judge from Shimomura's text, he did not really believe that Mitnick was a passionate hacker out of love for the art and the need to ensure his own privacy in telephone networks, a loner, and suspected him of being a representative of some secret criminal community of hackers. Tsutomu, referring to Mark, also mentions a detail that Kevin did not have: according to his version, shortly before the hack, a certain acquaintance of Mitnick contacted Lottor and offered him to buy OKI source codes. Was this true, and if so, where did Kevin, who was on the run and was by no means raking in dollars (if we are to believe his version of events), get the money?

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Kevin Mitnick and his memoirs "Ghost in the Net"

Mitnick's own memoirs carefully emphasize that he was a persecuted loner, who even with the FBI on his tail could not refrain from hacking due to the liveliness of his character. Until the end of his days, he claimed that he had never hacked for financial reasons, and, especially, had never stolen money from accounts electronically. At the same time, Kevin constantly mentions at least active contacts with members of the international hacker community, where he knew many, from his native California to Germany and Israel, and with whom he continued to communicate even deep underground under false names. As is known, people write memoirs not only to tell their stories, but also to present themselves in the desired light and cover up inconvenient facts. This applies to literally any author of memoirs, including Mitnick and Shimomura. It is logical that if Kevin really did some of the hacks not only because of his own wild enthusiasm, but also because of some agreements with other hackers, then he hardly wanted to expose his colleagues to the machine of American justice, and even go to court not as a slacker, but as a member of a criminal community. Which usually means significantly longer prison terms, and Mitnick hated sitting in prison. Well, now Kevin has taken his possible untold secrets with him to the grave, probably forever.

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And this is Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, written by Shimomura and Markoff hot on the heels of the events of 1995.

Shimomura also claims that shortly before Mitnick and JSZ hacked his machines, Kevin called Markoff from a hidden number, without introducing himself, and directly demanded that he give him the OKI source code "the easy way, otherwise I'll get it one way or another." When asked why he needed it, Mitnick (according to Tsutomu, and this does not go beyond Kevin's version of events) explained that he needed the code to increase his invisibility in telephone networks due to the ability to quickly change the firmware of the device. Along the way, he was actively interested in Shimomura's personality, explaining that he identified him as a co-author of the part of the code he had obtained. Tsutomu also claims that Kevin, in a conversation with Markoff, expressed downright admiration for Shimomura's talents - but here, I suspect, he is already exaggerating a little. Lottor recorded the conversation and then played the recording to journalists John Markoff and Jonathan Littman, who had experience communicating with Mitnick and could recognize his voice. Markoff said it was similar, but not certain, but Littman was sure that Kevin himself had called Mark.

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Shimomura doesn't write this - but if we accept his version of the call, he was most likely also offended by racist stereotypes about kung fu, as well as by the deliberate comparison with a Chinese man (the Japanese and Chinese have a long history of mutual hostility, and they do not like it when they are confused, especially deliberately).

And so, sitting in the office of the Supercomputer Research Center, Shimomura at some point decided to take a break and listen to the voice messages that had been coming to his phone in recent days. Among them was one that greatly outraged him: someone with a fake Australian accent said: “Damn, my kung fu is better! I know the rdist style, the sendmail style, my kung fu is stronger than yours! Me and my friends are going to crush you!” Mitnick denied making this call for the rest of his life, and claimed that Shimomura simply made it up. According to Tsutomu, this was the last straw, after which he considered what was happening a personal insult and a challenge to a duel.

Part 12: The Hunt Is Tightening​


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The last days of January 1995 were some of the most unpleasant in Mitnick's life. The daring hack of the famous computer security specialist Tsutomu Shimomura, with the extraction of all his data, including personal correspondence, turned out to be a very bad idea . The ambitious Japanese was deeply offended and threw all his efforts into catching the hacker in the name of revenge - and his connections in the American intelligence services and the hacker community turned out to be a very serious resource . Until the beginning of 1995, Mitnick was wanted, and almost caught by the police in Seattle - but there was no targeted hunt for him. If he had behaved more carefully, he could well have lived out his days under one of the fake identities that he learned to create skillfully and convincingly. Alas, Kevin absolutely could not resist hacking - and one of them, in December 1994, turned out to be unnecessary. The enraged "cyber samurai" Tsutomu raised connections in the NSA and the FBI, managed to fire up the system - and the search for Mitnick began in earnest.

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Mitnick's New York Times Article

The grim news of John Markoff's back-to-back New York Times article about the Shimomura hack with a "declaration of war" and the Justice Department's press release about the start of an active search for "dangerous hacker Kevin Mitnick" found our hero on the Atlantic coast of Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, where he had a meeting with his cousin Mark Mitnick and his father, his own uncle.

Cousin Mark decided to try to help his troubled cousin enter his business of placing ads on store receipts under a false name, while also setting up a branch on the East Coast. This was not the first bad call in recent times - having barely arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, and rented an apartment under a new name, Mitnick came across a very quick recognition of the fakeness of his latest persona, and he had to urgently flee again, literally on the run creating another identity for himself.

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Hilton Head Island is a picturesque place by the sea, but Kevin was in no mood for admiring the beauty in late January 1995. Having

received a metaphorical control shot to the head in the form of an official announcement of a hunt by the Justice Department, Kevin went to clear his head on the beach. There he contacted a sympathetic journalist named Jonathan Littman via his specially modified phone. He didn’t completely trust Littman, but he was too eager to talk it out and share with someone what had hit him like a hammer to the head, and to express his suspicions that all this was not without reason. Mitnick was particularly outraged by the fact that the press release again mentioned hacking into the NORAD missile defense system's strategic computers among his sins. Kevin vehemently denied this until the end of his days and called it a canard invented by Markoff for the sake of effect and to draw an analogy with the plot of the popular film War Games about a hacker who almost started a nuclear war.

However, for the sake of conspiracy, Mitnick did not dissuade Littman from the assumption that he was hiding somewhere in the Midwest - especially since this assumption was put forward by Markoff, who was friends with Shimomura and with whom Littman was also in contact. Kevin assumed that now the secret services would definitely take control of the phones through which he communicated with his mother and grandmother, who lived in Vegas, while on the run - and his premonition was not deceived. Social engineering methods came in handy again: a telephone company employee kindly explained to a “colleague from another department” that the numbers in question had been wiretapped by the company’s security service several days earlier on orders from the security forces. By February 2, Mitnick was back in Raleigh, where he had obtained a driver’s license under yet another fake name, this time under the name of J. Thomas Case. He could literally feel the very unkind attention of those who were out to catch him.

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Five days later, on February 7, 1995, a special task force was formed to hunt Mitnick, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Walker. It was a hodgepodge of law enforcement and civilians, including, of course, Tsutomu Shimomura. Moreover, Walker informally made Shimomura his colleague in leading the group - and even, not quite according to protocol, provided him with some classified information and opportunities from the FBI. Moreover, since the task force was informal, Tsutomu was given carte blanche to do anything to wiretap Mitnick without a court order, which was a direct violation of U.S. and state laws. Why? Because Walker and his colleagues believed that only Shimomura's advanced knowledge and skills, coupled with his personal interest, would make it possible to quickly and effectively locate Mitnick and detain him.

The justification for the case of publicity was to be that Shimomura allegedly did all this himself with the assistance of some people from telephone companies, and the hands of the prosecutor's office and the FBI - here they are, completely uninvolved and did not notice anything. Including for this reason, according to Mitnick, the hacking of Tsutomu's computers will never be brought against Kevin among the official charges. It could drag along those details that the "hunters" preferred to leave outside the court's field of view. Shimomura was extremely happy with such conditions: literally within the canons of typical Japanese cyberpunk, he really liked to work "with the system" and use the accompanying opportunities and privileges, but he could not stand to observe formal rules and restrictions. In fact, he needed special relations with the special services in many ways in order to be able to ignore some of the rules in any way, including publicly and in front of congressmen.

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In this regard, Tsutomu Shimomura was as typical a character of Japanese cyberpunk as Kevin Mitnick, an independent hacker-rebel, was of American

. Meanwhile, Kevin himself understood that it would be extremely useful for him to penetrate the knowledge and plans of the hunters. He had no particular illusions about being able to hack Shimomura himself again - but John Markoff, who was not nearly as advanced in cybersecurity, was clearly involved in the hunt. Mitnick managed to hack his mail without any particular problems, but there he discovered that - apparently on Shimomura's advice - he was erasing all important correspondence from the mailbox and copying the texts somewhere else, probably to a computer without a network connection. Then Kevin set up an interception of his correspondence and was very pleased with it.

However, he did not know that this step of his had already been calculated by Tsutomu. He kept a close eye on Markoff's mailbox, saw all of Mitnick's manipulations perfectly well, and further convinced himself of his opponent's identity by seeing the hacker search his mail for texts using the query *itni*. Worse, Shimomura quickly figured out that the hacker had repeatedly accessed the network through modems in Raleigh and Denver, and immediately reported this to the task force leader Walker. He alerted the Colorado and North Carolina FBI units, as well as local communications companies. They quickly managed to figure out the number Mitnick was using - but there was a problem: his OKI phone was modified so that it could access the cellular network from a variety of numbers.

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But Shimomura was simultaneously working on different options for how to get to Mitnick. Kevin soon discovered that someone was already using his marty account on the hacker site escape.com — where he communicated via seemingly closed and secure communication channels with other hackers, and also stored various previously obtained files and databases. In a cold sweat, Mitnick logged out of the account and tried to find traces of the hack, but he couldn’t. He tried to find help from his Israeli friend and fellow hacker JSZ, with whom they had broken into Shimomura’s cars — but at that very moment, Shimomura’s father was hospitalized with a severe heart attack, and he was offline almost all the time.

At the same time, Shimomura and the security service employees of the General Telephone telephone company, mobilized by the FBI to catch Mitnick, had already realized that the number they had identified was fake — and were looking for ways to still get at least some useful information through it. Soon, a simple and logical idea struck them: they needed to track down the phones that were calling this very number. The idea turned out to be correct, and Mitnick clearly neglected the need to change numbers on his phone more often: it turned out that he had been repeatedly called from different numbers in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, where Kevin was running around and organizing a new identity for himself, which required paperwork - and contacts with different offices.

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So, the location of the hacker was determined by the hunters. Having received this information, Shimomura and Markoff immediately took the next plane tickets and flew to Raleigh. Well, Mitnick, once again trying to get online, discovered that the modem number he used had a call tracer installed. Kevin tried to use the usual methods of social engineering, dialed General Telephone under the guise of an investigator working on a murder case, and asked the employee to clarify the date and time the tracer was installed on his number 558-89-00. Alas, for Mitnick - but the employee had clearly already been instructed by the security service, and did not give him any information. On the contrary, she politely but persistently tried to find out as much information as possible about the caller. Kevin understood everything and hung up. Only now he transferred his cunning phone to another number of another cellular operator Cellular One.

But by that time Shimomura and Markoff had already arrived in Raleigh. Tsutomu stormed into the Sprint office with what looked like a commissioner's powers. He took a couple of engineers with him, and they installed a Cellscope 2000 radio direction-finding device at the city's cellular node. Employees of all cellular operators operating in and around Raleigh, including Cellular One, were instructed to immediately report any network anomalies to Shimomura. As soon as Mitnick showed up on the Cellular One network with a new number and began connecting to Netcom, it was detected - and Tsutomu immediately received all the information he needed.

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He, Markoff, and one of the engineers, who acted as the operator of the portable direction-finding unit, jumped into the car and rushed to calculate Mitnick's exact location on the streets of the city. The growing signal level led them to the outskirts of Raleigh, to the buildings of the Players Club residential complex near a large overgrown vacant lot that went towards farmland. Tsutomu recalled that he appreciated Mitnick's cunning: if necessary, one could slip out through this vacant lot unnoticed and literally go into the "greenery" of the vegetable gardens. It was an early winter morning, and not so many windows were lit in the buildings. They reasoned that the elusive Mitnick should be behind one of them.

Luck favored the hunters again. The radio intercept recorded a telephone conversation from an anomalous number. Through the static, Markoff recognized one of the voices: it belonged to the well-known hacker Eric Corley, founder of the specialized magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, better known by his pseudonym Emmanuel Goldstein, after the hero of Orwell's novel 1984. And then he recognized the voice of the second interlocutor: of course, it was Kevin Mitnick.

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Shortly after midnight the next day, February 15, 1995, Kevin went up to his room after the gym and sat down at his computer. He knew perfectly well that the noose was tightening, but he assumed that the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, as bureaucratic organizations, were somewhat slow, and they would have to spend some time to prepare an arrest legally and protocolally correctly. During this time, he was going to prepare everything, clean up the network, and get out. However, when he logged into his main file storage in the online community The WELL, he discovered more oddities: some of his backdoors had disappeared somewhere, and everything was wrong again. Kevin's entire being literally screamed with anxiety and paranoia, although there were no formal reasons yet. He looked out the window, looked around, but saw nothing strange, and sat back at the computer.

And then, while he was trying to comprehend what was happening, trying to cope with his emotions and changing the passwords on his accounts, there was a knock on the door at half past one in the morning.

— Who's there?
— Open up, FBI!

Kevin froze. Having overcome his panic, he tried to make his voice calm and asked:

— Who are you looking for?
— Kevin Mitnick. Are you Kevin Mitnick?
— No! — he responded, desperately trying to portray the indignation of an innocent person who was inappropriately disturbed. — You can check my mailbox!

There was silence outside the door. Kevin rushed to the window and tried to figure out whether he would be able to get out safely. The height did not allow it, and if he clearly tried to escape, they could simply shoot him. Mitnick called his mother directly and told her in plain text where he was, that the FBI had come for him and he did not know where they would take him now. She, through a relative, gave him the number of lawyer John Isurdiaga, who was already working with Kevin. The knocking on the door became much more insistent — and the hacker thought it best to open it. Behind her stood a rather angry 40-year-old black man with a graying beard, an FBI agent named LeVord Burns, who was in charge of the arrest operation.

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FBI Special Agent LeVord Burns (left), 2005

What followed was a sad comedy of situations and mistakes. Mitnick desperately tried to convince the FBI that he was not Mitnick at all, but rather Thomas Case, his new alias - but they did not even think of believing him, enthusiastically and professionally rummaging through his things. Kevin tried to get to the letter of the law, pointing out that the search warrant did not specify a specific address - but the agents, without interrupting the search, delivered a new warrant with the correct address within half an hour.

With each passing hour, the number of clues grew: a suitcase with blank forms that he had stolen from South Dakota was found (it was locked, and one of the agents, in anger at the suspect's refusal to open it, almost tried to cut it open with a knife - but, to Mitnick's disappointment, the agents remembered in time that this would make the evidence obtained in this way invalid in court), and documents in different names that he had used before, and a clearly excessive number of cell phones for an ordinary American in the 90s. And the final touch was... an old ski suit. In one of its many pockets, an ancient receipt for payment was found in the name of Kevin Mitnick.

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Kevin was particularly offended by the fact that the official wanted poster used his old prison photo, where he was not a fit, lean guy, but a slob weighing over 100 kg.

Mitnick was happily told that he was under arrest - and was not even read the required Miranda declaration. He was not only handcuffed, but also put in leg irons, and led outside. Kevin's more than two-year run was over. A new and very sad era in his life was beginning.

Part 13: The Hacker Embraced by the System​


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So, on February 15, 1995, in Raleigh, North Carolina, the more than two-year life of the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick in an underground position came to an end . Insulted by the hack, the "cyber samurai" Tsutomu Shimomura, who worked with American intelligence agencies and corporations, managed to do in a couple of months what the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies were incapable of: he found Mitnick by barely perceptible traces on the Internet and cellular networks, and only allowed the agents to detain him. The press rejoiced: the terrible elusive super-hacker, who (according to the press) even hacked the control systems of nuclear weapons in Cheyenne Mountain, was finally captured and would stand trial. Kevin was sure that this was the end of his life - and that all that awaited him was hopelessness in a prison cell for many, many years. To his own surprise, he was right only partly.

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Kevin's photo immediately after his arrest

From his rented apartment, the exposed hacker was taken by FBI agents to the Wake County jail in downtown Raleigh. The guards had been strictly instructed not to let Mitnick near a phone or any other electronic device under any circumstances, but Kevin used his social skills and charisma to the max and convinced the most soft-hearted employee to let him contact his mother "about posting bail." He told her and her grandmother that he was in jail in Raleigh and that everything was very sad. He also called his colleague in not-so-legal hacking cases, de Payne, and outlined the situation, thereby hinting that he should get rid of any possible evidence in his possession that could be connected to the "Mitnick case."

In the morning, Kevin was escorted to the courtroom, which was already packed with journalists. Camera flashes flashed. Here Mitnick saw Shimomura in person for the first time: he was sitting with his girlfriend Julia, the same one whose ski vacation Kevin had ruined with his hack, and journalist John Markoff. Mitnick and Shimomura met gloomily with their eyes. Soon the judge solemnly announced that Kevin Mitnick would be held without bail. Well, the Marshals Service insisted that Mitnick, due to his social danger and pumped-up social skills, should sit exclusively in a solitary confinement cell. The hacker's heart once again failed: ever since his first prison term in Los Angeles, solitary confinement cells had literally become his nightmare; he preferred even the company of hardened gangsters and ghetto junkies to living in a tiny closet with dim light. Leaving the courtroom under the flashes of cameras, Kevin courteously nodded to Tsutomu, acknowledging his victory and the level of knowledge and skills required for this - and Tsutomu responded in kind. A crowd of paparazzi and onlookers were already waiting for the hacker as he exited the building.

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The newspaper for February 16, 1995 about the arrest of Kevin Mitnick

The very next day, The New York Times published an article by John Markoff about the end of the hunt. The triumphant formal head of the task force, Kent Walker, an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, commented in it: “Mitnick was the most wanted computer hacker in the world. There is reason to believe that he gained access to trade secrets worth billions of dollars. He represented a very big threat!” In the following three days, the capture of Kevin Mitnick was the main topic of discussion on TV channels, radio stations and in newspapers in the United States. Well, the hacker himself, meanwhile, with a growing sense of hopelessness, read the lists of what he was actually accused of. The investigation listed 23 episodes of illegal use of funds, 21 episodes of illegal use of other people's numbers for calls (under the then US federal law, electronic serial numbers of devices were considered confidential information, and one such episode could drag on for up to 20 years), and so on.

Considering the lovely tradition of the American legal system not to absorb smaller terms into larger ones, as in the European and Russian tradition, but to sum them up - our hero was facing something like 460 years in prison with all the proven episodes. Of course, these thoughts did not bring joy to Mitnick. He was especially outraged by the accusations of illegal use of funds: Kevin admitted that he hacked the client base of the Netcom company, where more than 20,000 credit card numbers were stored, and could have literally denied himself nothing if he wanted, but until his last days he claimed that he had not spent a cent from them, because he considered such a thing beneath his dignity as an honest hacker. And Markoff and Shimomura, who never sympathized with him, acknowledged that Mitnick, despite his disregard for intellectual property rights and other people's privacy, did not use his knowledge and skills for profit.

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And he didn’t hack into the strategic computers in the NORAD bunker either, but the press liked that story too much.

Kevin was soon taken to the Johnston County Jail in Smithfield, North Carolina, and thrown into solitary confinement. Mitnick felt with his whole being the literal embodiment of his nightmares with full immersion. After waiting for a week for the “client” to warm up, the young and ambitious assistant U.S. Attorney John Bowler, who had taken on his case, came to Kevin and offered him a deal: he would sign a waiver of certain rights, such as making calls outside the circle of immediate family and a lawyer, the right to bail, and a preliminary hearing. After talking with his lawyer John Izurdiaga, Mitnick considered it best to make the agreement: he was seriously afraid that after a few more months in solitary confinement he would simply go crazy and develop serious health problems.

Having moved to a general cell, Kevin relaxed and exhaled - but then a new misfortune occurred. At some point, the lawyer and his partner Richard Steingard contacted him, clearly frustrated, and began to interrogate him: how did Mitnick hack into American intelligence systems and what classified government information did he manage to access? Kevin laughed nervously and began to explain that he had never touched the CIA in his life, and that these were all journalistic tales - but the lawyers explained the situation. The comrades in civilian clothes demanded that Mitnick be thoroughly interrogated by their colleagues. On the subject of national security. And it would be better for him not to hide anything. Mitnick said that he had nothing to tell, that he had never hacked the CIA, but if the guys from Langley really wanted to, then he was ready to talk to them, there was nowhere else to go anyway. Oddly enough, the CIA never came to talk to him: apparently, along the way, they figured out that these were just hacker tales and journalistic canards.

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Then Mitnick's prison wanderings began. He was... kicked out of the Johnston County Jail in Smithfield. The warden didn't even hide the fact that he was intercepting and reading all of Kevin's correspondence, although it was technically illegal, and ignored the demands of the lawyers until they managed to get a court order prohibiting such things. Then the warden announced that he was not going to be held responsible for the fact that this trickster of yours would again do something with his social skills on his territory - and he managed to transfer the hacker to the Vienna prison, another county in North Carolina. With significantly worse conditions. The deputy marshal who was transporting Kevin literally laughed out loud that he was the first prisoner he could remember being kicked out of prison.

Mitnick spent five months there until the prosecutors and lawyers managed to find a compromise. It went like this: Kevin pleads guilty to one of the counts of "taking a cell phone number/electronic device serial number pair," and then the sentence would have been somewhere between 8 months and 20 years (a good range, yes). At the same time, he was supposed to be transported from North Carolina across the country back to his homeland in California and tried there - including for an old parole violation. But there was a nuance: prisoners in the US are transported not on planes, but on special buses, and even hardened gangsters don't really like getting on them, calling them "diesel therapy." The guards there are quite philosophical about respecting the rights of those being transported, and the journey often takes complex, winding routes between many prisons, where those being transported are temporarily housed while awaiting the next flights - and this can last for weeks and months. Especially when it comes to transporting across the country from coast to coast. On his way to California, Mitnick was stuck for several weeks in what he described as a hellish prison in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Finally, Mitnick got to the already familiar Federal Correctional Center in Los Angeles - and there again month after month of waiting, trials, debates and so on dragged on. Kevin was extremely grateful to his lawyers, who selflessly and for free, but ultimately not very successfully defended his interests due to old ties with his relatives - and with dark sarcasm he thought that if he had been less picky, he could have withdrawn tons of money from those credit cards and hired someone cool and famous. At some point, Richard Sherman, Lewis de Payne's lawyer, joined the defense: he had long worked on the defense of hackers and said that the authorities with Shimomura violated many of their own rules in the Mitnick case. However, after some time, Kevin suspected him of actually playing for the prosecutors and only trying to gain his trust in order to get information and more reliably drown him.

On September 26, 1996, a year and a half after his arrest, a Los Angeles grand jury indicted hacker Kevin Mitnick on 25 counts, including unlawful use of a computer and wire fraud, hijacking access devices, including computer passwords, damaging computers, and so on. Of course, all this joy was compounded by a pile of initial charges filed in Raleigh. William Keller, with the wonderful nicknames "Killer" and "Central California Hangman," was almost appointed to judge Mitnick: this judge was known for his harshest sentences, as well as his particular penchant for imposing capital punishment. Under his watchful eye, Mitnick could well have gone to prison for life on the combined charges, and he had many a sad time trying to figure this out.

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But in the end, the new lawyer hired, Donald Randolph, managed to get the much more moderate Marianne Pfaelzer to judge his case, thanks to an obscure technicality. She had tried Kevin before, and it had been a relatively bloodless case. At the first hearing, she had tried Mitnick on the Raleigh charges and on the parole violation, and had sentenced him to just 22 months in prison. By then, he had served 26 months, and now he could again count on being released on bail, which was what the lawyer had asked for. But the judge agreed with the prosecutor that Kevin had already proven himself in this regard, was a danger to society as an unstoppable hacker and experienced underground worker, and it would be better to keep him in prison for now. Moreover, she refused to even grant Mitnick a formal bail hearing. By then, the countdown to prison was not months, but years.

Attorney Randolph seized on this and made a fuss in the press. The fact is that the denial of a bail hearing, as opposed to the actual release, is a rare, scandalous case in American judicial practice and is considered by many to be a gross violation of the constitutional rights of a US citizen. Hearings of this kind are usually not denied not only to hackers and managers caught evading taxes, but also to complete monsters like serial killers and terrorists. In addition, as an attorney, he was denied access to evidence and other case materials under various pretexts, which was also outrageous and not entirely legal. And Judge Pfelzer perceived the offer to sit in the visiting room with a laptop to familiarize her client with electronic evidence as almost a confession to planning an escape and hacking the Pentagon. According to Mitnick, the judge simply had a rather vague understanding of computers and how the Internet works - this was 1998, and the prosecution deliberately intimidated her by saying that Mitnick could practically open Fort Knox and launch a nuclear missile if she got her hands on even a cell phone.

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The image of the all-powerful hacker from the 90s who can hack the Pentagon with a calculator is partly due to the media frenzy surrounding the Mitnick case.

Thanks to the efforts of both lawyers and old hacker friends, a real movement for the release of Kevin Mitnick gradually emerged in American society as a hacker, albeit an honest hacker, accused of a bunch of things he did not do, and with a bunch of procedural violations. His supporters, led by IT activist David Corley, distributed and pasted black and yellow FREE KEVIN stickers, organized protests and agitated the inhabitants of the Internet, which was gradually becoming more and more popular. And they even tried to organize a meeting with Kevin in prison to congratulate him on his 35th birthday on August 6, 1998, but they did not receive permission. They carried out the action differently: at the appointed time, Mitnick pressed a sticker with FREE KEVIN to the window of the prison library, and the activists, who were already prepared, took a photo and distributed it online and in the press.

One of the most notable protests was staged by supporters of the movement to free Kevin Mitnick a month earlier, in July 1998, in front of the Miramax studio in New York. They protested against the start of filming of the movie Takedown (2000) based on a script by Shimomura and Markoff. In the script leaked to the press, the story of the hunt for Mitnick was transformed from a conflict between IT specialists into a cross between a spy action movie and a thriller, and Kevin turned out to be an arch-villain-psychopath who beat the heroic Tsutomu with a garbage lid and, just for lulz, turned data on the treatment of patients in clinics into mincemeat. The film was eventually released in 2000, but due to the scandal and accusations of mendacity, it was not even released in the US, and was only sold on tapes and DVDs. It also failed to find success with viewers (IMDb 6.2, Rotten Tomatoes 55% at the time of writing). But for Mitnick and his lawyers, this story became an excellent way to remind people about themselves, to appear in the press, to make statements about violations during the trial, and once again to pull part of public opinion to their side.

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Oddly enough, another gift of fate was the attempt of some FBI employees, led by Special Agent Kathleen Carson, to bury Kevin deeper with accusations - they convinced state prosecutors to claim that Mitnick had caused $300 million in damage to companies, although the companies he had hacked had never claimed anything like that. For example, the source code of the Solaris operating system copied by Mitnick was valued at $80 million, a fraud of such an amount that would have allowed him to be given up to life in prison - but this was the amount that the development of this entire software product cost, and not the damage caused.

The obvious absurdity of such accusations and the threat that such a calculation method threatened to the entire computer community (literally copied Windows for personal use - owes Bill Gates the entire cost of development!) caused a storm of indignation around the world and attracted many more people to the movement for Mitnick's release than before. In his memoirs, he writes with pleasure that calls for his acquittal and rescue were put forward even from Russia, including in the form of an action by computer specialists with posters on Red Square near the Kremlin walls - which was shown by the world media. In the US, the number of cities where rallies and actions in defense of the hacker took place began to be counted in dozens - with posters and T-shirts with calls for FREE KEVIN, they regularly found themselves in front of television cameras. The trial against the "most dangerous hacker" began to turn into a socio-political issue of national and international scale, which greatly worried the IT community and the inhabitants of the Internet in general.

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A rally in defense of Kevin Mitnick outside the Miramax office, July 1998

From a public enemy and a dangerous hacker, Kevin Mitnick had gradually turned into a symbol of the unfair persecution of computer scientists by the government, corporations, and intelligence agencies by 1999, who wanted to ban just about everything on the Internet. At the same time, most of his supporters did not call for all charges against Kevin to be dropped entirely — they did not deny that he had managed to cause a lot of mischief, and that he should be punished for what he had actually done. But this punishment, they believed, should not be absurdly cruel and should not create precedents that were dangerous for everyone. Thus, from a hunted animal in a trap and imprisoned in a cramped solitary confinement cell, Mitnick, somewhat unexpectedly for himself and without leaving prison awaiting sentencing, turned into a figure of national significance and a symbol of the computer community's struggle for online freedoms. Now the battle between the hacker and the state was no longer one-sided - but the main battle was still ahead.

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