The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (37 page)

"And so, just in pure coding, that's a fair amount of time. It's not
a trivial hack."

"I can't really estimate because I'm not a C-programmer. So, I
would just be speculating.. . ."

■ > ■

Mitnick returns to a topic he's already touched on. He's not surprised
that Shimomura has managed to portray his failure to protect his

home computer into a noble act. It's an irony the press has missed.
Shimomura's a hero instead of a goat.

"Of course!" Mitnick exclaims. "He's a spook!"

But Kevin Mitnick, at least, believes Shimomura isn't quite the
white knight portrayed by the press. "I mean why was he working
with Mark Lottor in developing patches to the Oki firmware that
allows people to do ESN changes via the [cellular phone] keypads?
What legitimate need would someone have to change their ESN on
the keypad?"

I can't think of one. Hackers generally alter the firmware of cellu-
lar phones so they can ESN skip — stick other people with their cel-
lular phone bills — or perform countersurveillance on the feds who
are trying to nab them. But it's a fine line. It's not strictly illegal to
alter the workings of a cellular phone. It depends what you do
with it.

"So he's a hacker." Mitnick groans at the irony. "The guy's a
hacker. Maybe a cellular phone person was interested in what code
he had and that's why he was attacked."

Mitnick just described himself. Or dozens of other hackers.

"Another possibility," I venture, hoping to get a response, "is that
Shimomura's spook employers want him to do these hacker things.
They want him to know all about changing ESNs."

"I don't know what his motive is. I don't know the man at all. Alls
I know is he's very technical and he's very good at what he does.
He's in the top five."

"What makes Shimomura so good?"

"When someone penetrates his system he knows what to look for.
When you compile a program, it uses external files and libraries.
This is the type of guy that would look at the access times of the files
to try to figure out what type of program somebody was compiling.
The guy's sharp."

On UNIX systems it's possible to tell the last time a file was read.
Mitnick's guessing that Shimomura could determine the type of ap-
plication that was compiled (converted into the computer's most ba-
sic machine language) by examining the date stamps in certain
system directories. He's also acknowledging he knows that the in-
truder compiled a program while he was on Shimomura's machine.

Once again, Kevin Mitnick seems to have an amazing amount of
detail on how Shimomura analyzes an attack.

"He's just very good at — well, he's a spook. What do you ex-
pect? This is only what I hear in the grapevine."

It must be a very well connected grapevine. Talking with Mit-
nick is maddening. There are so many variables. Is he telling me
the truth, what he thinks is the truth, or just trying to con me?
Perhaps Mitnick's telling me the truth because he's proud of him-
self and he's a crazy megalomaniac. After all, he's protecting him-
self legally by saying he didn't do it. Or maybe he's giving me
misinformation so that our phone conversation or anything I may
tell someone else or write will prove him innocent because his de-
scription is flawed.

On the other hand, if he didn't do the hack, there are still more
variables. He may have even watched the hack, and he's giving me
straight information while still providing himself with an alibi. Or he
could have watched the hack, like other hackers, and even though he
knows how it's done, he's feeding me wrong information to protect
his ally.

Finally, there's some small chance Mitnick may actually be telling
it straight. He really had nothing to do with it, and he's just passing
on hearsay because he's so delighted with the outcome. It's hard to
know for certain. The best I can do is get him to answer questions
that can be confirmed by other sources. I return to the puzzle.

"But does the grapevine say he's primarily a spook?"

"Unknown. He's good in security and he consults with companies
like Trusted Information Systems, the people that develop Internet
fire walls, and a lot of people in D.C. and the Virginia area."

Trusted Information — the name strikes a bell. Markoff quoted
someone from Trusted Information in his front-page "Data Threat"
article.

"Where is Trusted Information?"

"Oh, in Maryland, 301 area code. Baltimore, I believe."

"What are some of the Virginia companies Shimomura works
with?"

"I just have the phone numbers," Mitnick reveals casually. "I
haven't called them yet to see."

"I'd be interested, because obviously in Virginia there's a high
concentration of—"

"Intelligence," Mitnick says. "I'm not sure if he [Shimomura]
calls the NSA or something, but I know he does consulting for
them."

"Obviously, if they're intelligent, he's not calling them [the NSA].
He's just calling Trusted Information or some other company."

"Right. I don't think he's trying to hide the fact that he works for
the intelligence community. Maybe — did you ever think of the big
picture? Maybe the reason he didn't want ..." Mitnick stops and
pauses. "Maybe the government uses this code to break into domes-
tic systems or foreign systems so they can look at other people's stuff
in the intelligence community and they don't want things fixed. Did
you ever think of that?"

■ a a

"So I can only guess about this," I venture, " but I'm guessing he was
paid by the NSA or another agency to hack this stuff out —"

"It's all speculative," Mitnick cuts me off. "I'm not interested in
what the government's up to in that respect. Then they consider you
a real threat. In my pranks I always stayed out of that type of [intel-
ligence computer systems]. I don't want to know. You know what
I'm saying?"

I quickly shift gears to ask him about the other big clue the in-
truder left behind. "The
Newsweek
story mentioned ' "Don't you
know who I am?" he asked in a faux British accent.' "

"Yeah. The voice mail that he [Shimomura] got. Maybe that's the
guy that did it," Mitnick offers unenthusiastically. "Who knows?"

"Any guesses who might have made that phone call?"

"No."

■ ■ ■

"Hi. Sorry about that," Mitnick greets me in a new call, the last one
having faded out several minutes before. "I wanted you to talk to
your people at
Playboy,"
he jokes. "I think they could come out with
a good pictorial. We could have like a scene called 'Cyberpumping.'
You could have me in there with some gorgeous redhead."

Mitnick really is tired of living on the run.

"Cyberpumping? How would the layout go?"

"I'm imagining that now," he pauses for dramatic effect. "It
would not have my face. My back, the back of my head.
Playboy's pretty conservative. That's the unfortunate thing."

"Why a redhead?"

"Oh, I like redheads!"

"Intelligent?"

"Hey! I saw this one: me and a couple of friends of mine were at a
titty bar, and there was this one there, man, that blew me away. My
favorite trick is folding up the dollar bill between my teeth and then
having them grab it with their big tits. Hey! If you ever go to Vegas,
my favorite hangout is ..."

■ ■ ■

"BEEP!"

It's my line again.

"Can I just get rid of this call? I'm sorry."

"Yeah. I know, you gotta beep somebody."

"I swear to god, just two seconds."

It's John Markoff. I ask if I can give him a call right back.

"OK. Sorry," I say, returning to the hacker.

"Yeah," Mitnick replies, suspicious.

"I got beeped. You know how it is."

"Why don't you just call Shimomura himself?" Mitnick presses.
"I gave you his phone number."

"Sorry about that," Mitnick apologizes a few minutes later when he
phones back after yet another of his calls patched out.

"That's OK," I say. "Bad connections this morning. Now we got
some — do you hear that noise?"

Mitnick sounds like he's in a giant beehive. Where in the world
is he?

"Yeah. It's because I'm in a room that has that noise."

"I won't ask any questions," I kid him.

"A disc drive spinning," Mitnick jokes.

But his good humor doesn't last long. He's complaining again
about
Newsweek
putting his name "way in lights" when he says he
hasn't done anything new.

"Maybe they think I did Shimomura, you know. They're bringing
up cellular involved in it. Who knows?

"I know you can find out the inference here by calling your friend
John Markoff because Markoff is friends with Shimomura. Why
don't you just dial Markoff up and say, 'Hey, Markoff, what's the
scoop?' "

A couple of minutes later, as if on cue, my call waiting beeps
again.

"Could you hold on just one second? My beeper's going off
again," I kid him.

"Looks like they got half of the trace done," Mitnick jokes.

It's John Markoff again. I apologize, and ask once again if I can
call him back. He tells me not to worry about it, jokes we'll probably
play telephone tag a couple more times, and asks me to call him back
when I've got a chance.

"It didn't work," I say, returning to Mitnick.

"They couldn't get it? They didn't give you the number I'm at?"

"They tried."

"411-625 —?" Mitnick begins, deliberately leaving off the end of
the number.

"First they thought it was Cleveland. Then they thought it was
Detroit," I joke.

"Shit! That's close. If you ever go to Detroit, they have a great
thing called Saunders hot fudge."

First strippers, and now fudge.

"Where in Detroit?"

"It's everywhere. They even have it in the markets. Put it this way.
In the last month, I had a hot fudge Saunders sundae and it was out
of this world!"

Mitnick starts joking about what he might do to Shimomura. With
what he calls a beeper's "cap code" — the beeper's equivalent of
a cellular phone's electronic serial number — and the radio

frequency, he says he could clone Shimomura's beeper and get
beeped simultaneously when Shimomura does.

"I have his beeper number. I could see who's paging his ass,"
Mitnick chortles. "You could really fuck up someone's social plans.
Call the person. And when they beep, you call back."

Mitnick chuckles as he makes a pretend call to Shimomura, dem-
onstrating how easily he could lead the security expert astray. Then
Mitnick gets serious again.

"You know what Tsutomu's doing?" Mitnick asks. He always
calls Shimomura by his first name in a familiar, friendly tone. "I hear
he's working for the Air Force, working on a design to do strategic
attacks on enemy foreign computer systems. He's a hacker for the
government."

"You know this picture in
Newsweek}"
I tell Mitnick. "It has this
little picture of Shimomura on top of his own head."

Mitnick's surprised.

"Shimo has a picture in
Newsweek
too? 'Cuz, I just went into the
store and just saw my picture. I didn't even buy it, I didn't even want
to waste my money."

"It has a huge color picture of Shimo."

"Really?"

"With a little picture of himself sitting on top of his own head —"

"He's going to make a lot of money off of this 'cuz everybody's
going to want to talk to this guy!"

"You gotta just browse through it," I interrupt. "Next to the key-
board, I swear it looks like there is a samurai sword."

"I'm sure he'd like to chop some people's heads off." Mitnick
chortles, and then pauses. "No, look at it. It's perfect, man. I'm the
scapegoat. There's someone to blame it on for a matter of honor.

"Imagine having an advertisement in
Newsweek
fucking maga-
zine! Do you know how many people are going to be calling this
guy? 'Hey, I'm with blah-blah-blah company, come talk to me.'

"This doesn't hurt Tsutomu at all. Alls it does is makes him much
more in the public eye, and much more chance to make money. I
wonder if I should just become a real criminal and start doing this

for a lot of cash. Because I'm going to get the same punishment
either way.

"What do I have to lose? It's so fucking easy. I don't know, it's
just hard crossing that boundary for me. You know, my personal
values."

■ • ■