To Catch A Hacker
The Age
Tuesday January 3, 1995
Kevin Mitnick is a computer genius. It is said he once hacked into America's defence systems, giving him the power to blow up the world.
Now he's on the run, evading the FBI, the Los Angeles police and a wealth of technology. John Sweeney tracked him down.
THE BIG-HEARTED city with no more personality than a paper cup filled the window as the jumbo side-slipped towards Los Angeles Airport.
Somewhere down there amid the movie stars, drive-by killers, surf Nazis and teen gangs was Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick is the man they call ``Cyberspace's Most Wanted Fugitive". The cyberspace he lives in is the twilight zone created when man empowered computer to talk unto computer. Every time you gossip with a far-away friend, fly on a plane or take money out of the bank, the action has been immeasurably speeded up by the ability of computers to talk to each other.
``Electricity has made angels of us all," techno-gospeller Edmund Carpenter said two decades ago. But where there are angels to be found there must also be devils. Kevin Mitnick is a technological Lucifer, a brilliant computer whizz-kid who fell from grace to hack from the dark side. He is the most famous dark-side hacker an electronic outlaw who breaks into other people's computers by begging, borrowing or stealing their passwords.
Mitnick's hacking feats are mythic. With some friends he hacked into directory assistance for Providence, Rhode Island, so that when people dialled for information they got one of the gang instead. ``Is that person black or white, sir?" was a favorite line. ``You see, we have separate directories." Mitnick hacked into Pacific Bell's command system. The myth goes on to say he used his powers to disconnect the telephones of his enemies, his friends and movie stars he fancied. He hacked into Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He browsed through computers an ocean away inside Leeds University. He got into the computer security people's own secret files to discover how close they were to catching him.
The myth says he once even hacked into the North American air- defence command computer in Colorado to check the go-codes on the intercontinental ballistic missiles. He didn't blow up the world, the story goes, but he could have. The myth goes on: he's ``an electronic terrorist" and a computer addict to boot. Born into a not-well-off family of Russian Jewish extraction in Los Angeles in 1963, he taught himself everything he knows about computers. He can't stop helping himself to other people's databases. For this he served time. He is, in fact, one of the first people in the world to be imprisoned for computer hacking. He tried to go straight but couldn't keep his hands off the keyboards. Now and this is no myth he is on the run from the FBI, the US Marshal and the Los Angeles Police Department for breaking his parole and allegedly hacking into Government computers to create an entirely new identity for himself. He's a super- highwayman. He's the Ronnie Biggs of cyberspace.
LIKE A sea monster rising from the deep, Mitnick came up for air a few months ago, hacked into a computer bulletin board, trashed the man who once shopped him to the FBI and dived deep, deep back to where he came from. Or someone pretending to be Mitnick.
Mitnick (or an impostor) was not a happy cyberpunk to judge from his electronic mail (e-mail) message: >Newsgroups: alt.2600 >Subject: Kevin Mitnick >Date: 16 Jul 1994. 02:02:47 GMT >Lenny, your (sic) a low-life piece of shit scumbag >sucking snitch. I am getting real tired of hearing the >stories you fabricated . . . Hey asshole, when you give >your security talk in August at 3-Com on Telephone >Switching Security you should also train them on >employee theft. Your (sic) the expert!!! You would turn >in your own mother if you could benefit by it. KDM The e-mail letter raises a slurry of questions. Why did Alan Turing bother to father the computer if humanity can do nothing more with communications technology than cry ``Hey asshole"? Why should a fugitive break cover to score points no more elevated than a schoolboy's ``I'm telling on you"? Why such hatred for ``scumbag sucking snitch" Lenny?
The last question is the easy one. Lenny DiCicco was Mitnick's fellow computer hacker and friend until he played informer for the FBI. DiCicco got a soft probation instead of jail, which is where Mitnick ended up in 1988. And where he will end up again if they ever catch him.
REWIND BACK to the summer of 1988. Federal agents had been after the phantom hacker for months. Using the most sophisticated call-tracing technology on earth, they were about to catch him red-handed, hacking into the nation's computers from an apartment in Santa Monica. This time the FBI thought they had got their man. The Feds crashed through the door and trained their weapons on their target.
Mitnick had been monitored hacking into the top-secret research files of the megalithic Digital Equipment Company, then the second- biggest computer firm in the world. He had been helping himself to DEC's precious source codes. DEC's computer security people had traced the calls and tipped off the FBI. But the man staring up at the FBI gun barrels was not Mitnick: he was a Middle Eastern immigrant watching The Lucille Ball Show. Mitnick had hacked into PacBell's ``call-forwarding" computer net and left the FBI sniffing the reddest of herrings.
Mitnick, according to the FBI, used to have two computers running at the same time: one to do his piracy and the other to watch the phone system to see if anyone was trying to trace his phone. The law- enforcement authorities finally fingered him when Lenny DiCicco's nerves snapped at the end of 1988. He was fed up with Mitnick. But some of his close friends say that Mitnick's practical jokes can be irritating. He had changed DiCicco's telephone company billing name to Oliver North. He had changed his own subscriber name to James Bond; the last three digits of his new number? Work it out yourself.
What really got to DiCicco was much more vexing. The two had had a row about money. To get his own back for what he considered was an unpaid debt, Mitnick had phoned DiCicco's employers and pretended to be the taxman, asking for DiCicco's pay cheque to be stopped because of irregularities.
On 8 December 1988 at 5 pm, Mitnick and DiCicco were in a car park.
DiCicco grinned: ``Kev, you know that bad feeling you get in your stomach when you know you've been caught and you're about to be arrested?" ``Yeah?" replied Mitnick. ``Well," said DiCicco, ``get ready."
Six FBI men then popped out of the woodwork: one to arrest Mitnick and the other five to watch.
WHAT HAPPENED to Mitnick next can be explained only in terms of society's fear and loathing of the new, the alien, the darkly magical.
He was denied bail by three different federal judges who feared what havoc he could do in our computer-driven world placed in solitary confinement for eight months and not allowed to dial his own telephone numbers, lest he detonate computer virus bombs around the world. His guards could dial just a few predetermined numbers for him.
Reading the transcripts from the People v. Mitnick court case, it is clear that no one in authority understood how a heavily overweight techno-nerd as the papers defined Mitnick had hacked into the nation's most secret computer databases at his leisure. That Mitnick had not damaged or deleted anything in his travels through cyberspace was not taken into account; that he had trespassed into areas where he should not go was enough to condemn him in their eyes as an outlaw.
Mitnick was staring a longish prison sentence in the face when his lawyer, Alan Rubin, came up with a plan. Mitnick was a computerholic.
He needed a spell in a computer detox unit to cure him of his addiction, not prison. Although swayed, the judge still sentenced Mitnick to a year in the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Los Angeles, with an instruction that he spend time at a treatment centre on release.
A PICTURE of Einstein hangs on the wall of the Gateways Beit T'Shuvah residential treatment centre, a ramshackle Victorian villa in a run- down street in Los Angeles, the legend proclaiming: ``Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
I expressed to Harriett Rossetto, the centre's director, my scepticism about how someone could be addicted to hacking in the same way that others depend on the bottle. She fired back: ``Whenever anyone looks to an outside stimulant or activity to fill an inner emptiness, that behavior becomes addictive . . . For him, computer hacking elicits the rush from getting away from it."
She said she had suspected that the 12-step treatment program was not going to work in Mitnick's case. He was in too deep. She paused, then said, unexpectedly: ``I liked him." She went on: ``People were frightened of him, they really were."
BACK IN MY Los Angeles hotel I plugged in my Toshiba, got connected to the phone system and started leaving messages for Mitnick to phone me across town.
I called Ray Kaplan, a security consultant who knew Mitnick in the year between his leaving the detox unit and going on the run in November 1992. ``To some extent the security community is to blame that he's a fugitive. He did try to go straight. I organised a conference in Las Vegas entitled Here Is the Enemy with Kevin as guest speaker. But the industry is anally retentive. DEC had him thrown out.
Having spent a year in jail he was trying to go straight. They shunned him. He has a natural place in the computer industry, but the sad thing is that he has been forced out."
When the FBI started hunting him again for alleged parole violations, including a claim that he had hacked into the Department of Motor Vehicles in California, Mitnick was working as a researcher for a firm of private detectives, Teltec, in Malibu Canyon, north-west of Los Angeles. They missed him by minutes when they went to a copy shop, which they suspected he was using as a hacking base.
Before he disappeared he shared an apartment with Mark Kasden, a Teltec gumshoe. How did he meet Mitnick? ``His kid brother had OD'd on heroin in April 1992. Kevin came out to stay with his dad. I knew his dad, and we offered him this research job. He was not allowed to touch a computer as part of his parole, but he could use a phone."
What was Kevin like? ``Without saying the word `nerd', he was kind of a nerd. Who cares about hacking into a computer? It's boring."
I pressed Kasden. I had little sense of the man. What made him laugh? Kasden grinned: ``For amusement Kevin did this. He was a radio ham. You know those headsets they have in the drive-through restaurants to take orders from people? Well, Kevin worked out how to overstep the headsets. He would park nearby and scream: `Hey, f you!' and watch while the customer got a surprise."
Mitnick came alive for me when I met his former wife. The ``techno- nerd" of the authorised version would never have dated, still less married, an astute woman like Bonnie Vitello. She defended the ``electronic terrorist" and damned the easy stereotyping. ``Kevin didn't capitalise on what he knew. He didn't alter or delete or change anything. Kevin pissed off big business, DEC, PacBell, the law- enforcement agencies and that's why he became a threat. He simply proved to the big boys that they were vulnerable and they didn't want people to know that."
I RETURNED HOME to London, having failed to meet Mitnick. I had put out many messages on the Internet, but Mitnick was lying low. I went to drown my sorrows in the Coach and Horses. A phone rang. A breathy American voice came on the line: ``You'll never guess who this is?" It was Mitnick. He was on a mobile phone somewhere in the US. He was out of breath because he was walking around in the open all the better to cheat the FBI's call-location technology. Where to start?
Had he hacked into Norad, to check out the missile go-codes? ``No that's not true. That's where I draw the line: there is a difference between being a joyrider on the information superhighway and being a criminal. The media prints all this rubbish."
What about ``scumbag sucking snitch"? ``Somebody spoofed me. It sounds like it was written by a kid." He said that it was the first time he had ever talked to a journalist. He complained bitterly about sensationalist press coverage that had made him out to be ``like Carlos the Jackal". ``They have made me out to be a Johnny Dillinger or a desperado, but I'm just an excellent prankster. I have never profited from it."
I said that there seemed to be two Mitnicks, the person and the myth, and the myth was much more powerful than the person. ``Exactly.
The stories about me hacking into Norad and Hollywood film stars are bullshit." He put the phone on hold, as he had now arrived at his local McDonald's where he ordered a McGrill chicken, small fries and a diet Coke. Was the story true that he could override the drive-through radio headsets? ``Yeah you can imagine the fun you can have." He had started hacking at school, breaking into his teacher's computer.
``My teacher used to say: have no conscience. I developed a log-in snatcher so that I could get into other school's computers and I got an A for it. The cat-and-mouse game of outwitting each other I developed a passion for it which I still have today. It's like a drug with me. It was my all-consuming hobby. It satisfied me. I was pretty obsessed with it."
Did he feel sorry that his hacking cost him his marriage? ``I was just too addicted to my hacking. Bonnie never bought the addiction line, but I do. It was like a drug to me. The drug would come before the marriage. But it's very saddening."
What's your favorite film? He paused, then a chuckle came across the Atlantic: ``The Fugitive . . ." Mitnick had repeatedly mentioned the name of one of his British targets, a computer researcher called Neil Clift, formerly with Leeds University. I had tried to get hold of Clift, but his telephone number was ex-directory. Kevin had Clift's number, of course.
Clift was thoughtful about Mitnick: ``I'm one of his victims. At times it's been quite bad. He breaks into computers. He rings up everybody at work. You can't protect yourself against someone like him." Did he like him? ``Not before. But the other day he phoned me.
He might be interesting to get to know. It's strange. I have felt electronically hunted, a nightmare. The sad thing is he's trapped. He really likes the thrill of computer hacking. But now he's wanted.
There's no way out. He can't stop because he's on the run. He's got no escape . . ."
The myth of Kevin Mitnick may yet ensnare the man. No bad thing, perhaps: logging into other people's information may be thrilling for him, but less so for his victims. On the phone I liked him but I was also a little bit afraid of what he could do to me. I am left with this thought. In the year Kevin was born President John F. Kennedy declared: ``Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all."
Three decades on, the machines still have some catching up to do on the human computer called Kevin.
© 1995 The Age