The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (5 page)

His mother couldn't afford to buy him a personal computer so
Mitnick roamed like a techno gypsy from one Radio Shack to an-
other, slipping in a communications program disk and using the
store's modem to dial any computer he wished. His teachers at Mon-
roe High School described him as clever, until he began using its
computers to hack into the files of other schools. He dropped out
and was later expelled from a community college for similar pranks.

Those who crossed Mitnick did so at their own risk. He attached
a hospital's $30,000 in long distance charges to the home phone bill
of a ham radio enthusiast he hated. His goal was power. Mitnick
had little interest in making money with his phone and burgeoning
computer skills. For kicks, he tracked Susan Thunder, a prostitute
who had fallen hard for De Payne, finding out where she lived and
turned tricks, shutting off her phone service, forwarding her calls,
and broadcasting her sex talk on ham radio. In 1981, after Mitnick
and De Payne talked their way into a late-night unauthorized visit of
a Pac Bell computer operations center, Thunder planned her re-
venge. The computers of a San Francisco leasing company nearly
ground to a halt, and the operators arrived one morning to find the
floor littered with printouts carrying threats and the names of
Roscoe and Mitnick. It wasn't long before an investigator from the
district attorney's office chased young Mitnick on the 405 freeway
and handcuffed him at gunpoint. The charges were burglary, grand
theft, and conspiring to commit computer fraud. Thunder testified
for the prosecution and the juvenile court ordered a diagnostic psy-
chological study of Mitnick and sentenced him to a year's probation.

By 1984, Mitnick had a job and a black Nissan with the conspic-
uous vanity plate "X-HACKER." But the D.A.'s office was already
back on his tail, investigating allegations Mitnick was harassing
people on MIT's computers and hacking into phone company com-
puters. Mitnick's new office job was a convenient place to make his
pretext calls to Pac Bell and run TRW credit checks for kicks. But the
day before the D.A. served its search warrant, a man identifying
himself as a Los Angeles Police Department detective called into the
warrant section of the LAPD to confirm a probation violation war-
rant on Mitnick.

It was Mitnick, presumably, checking to see if he was wanted, and
when he got the bad news, he went underground, not to resurface
until the summer of 1985, after his arrest warrant expired. He en-
rolled at a Los Angeles technical school, the Computer Learning
Center, and impressed his instructors. In 1987, he surprised every-
one by dating a pretty, petite woman named Bonnie Vitello. They
were soon married.

Love brought out another side of Mitnick. The impulsive hacker
lost weight, danced at nightclubs, and shared romantic trips up the
California coast. But Mitnick hadn't gone cold turkey. To start with,
Bonnie Vitello happened to work for GTE, a phone company. Like
an addict, Mitnick would periodically escape into cheap motels with
a computer and modem for hacking binges, and sure enough, in
1987, he was busted again, this time for hacking into the computers
of a small Santa Cruz UNIX software maker. The charge was re-
duced to a misdemeanor when he agreed to explain how he did it,
and Mitnick was given three years probation.

He was on the verge of being hired by Security Pacific Bank, but
calls from an enemy ham radio operator and an LAPD detective
scuttled the job offer. Mitnick tried to get into security, and even filed
a fictitious business name, Security Software Services, in Sherman
Oaks in April of 1988. But by that summer, Kevin Mitnick had a new
plan. He wanted to learn more about Digital Equipment Corpora-
tion's latest VMS operating system for its powerful minicomputers.
He didn't just want the operating system, however, he wanted the
source code, the genetic blueprint, to discover more about its vul-
nerabilities. With the source code, Mitnick could understand more

about the complex program. He could also plant the seeds of his own
future games. At the least, he'd know better where to attack. And if he
was truly bent on creating mayhem, he could try to send the software
back to Digital's distribution centers, implanted with his own Trojan
horse programs, secret back doors to enable him to manipulate the
system at will.

But once again Mitnick was caught red-handed. Lacking his own
powerful computer, he'd been forced to stash his loot at the Univer-
sity of Southern California's computers, and, not surprisingly, the
university's system administrators had noticed his bulging files. There
was no evidence Kevin Mitnick planned to sell the software, modify
it, or even redistribute it. But what Mitnick looked upon as simple
copying, the government viewed as theft.

Kevin Mitnick was a serial hacker, and he'd given no one any
reason to believe he intended to quit.

Kevin Mitnick lifts his cell
phone to his ear on the 101
freeway, as he begins his three-hour trip to Las Vegas.

"Canoga Park SCC."

"Hi, this is Tom Bodette calling."

Why not? It worked on the security woman.

"I got a problem on a line," Bodette tells the technician at the Pac
Bell Switch and Control Center. "Here's the number, the trunk and
the TGID [trunk group identification number, the identifying num-
ber of a group of outgoing phone trunks]."

Mitnick is impersonating a Pac Bell technician, giving the perti-
nent line and trunk information to trace the switching trail of the
wiretap step by step, from the small Calabasas facility to the bustling
Sherman Oaks central office, and then to the LA 70 Tandem, one of
the main north-south phone corridors in the state.

He drives past Glendale and Alhambra, and at Ontario veers east
on Interstate 15 toward Vegas. He's finally free of the Southern Cali-
fornia sprawl, climbing above the smog into the San Gabriel Moun-
tains. Off to his right is Silverwood Lake and the San Bernardino
National Forest. A few minutes later the freeway sweeps back down
out of the mountains.

He's in the Mohave now, ten minutes from a lonely outpost called

Victorville. He's driven about seventy miles, but on his cell phone,
he's traveled four hundred miles north, back to an Oakland switch.
The one that switches all the Pac Bell wiretaps.

"I'm checking some trouble on a line," Bodette drawls, one hand
on the wheel, giving the number. "Can you put it down ?" Mitnick's
asking Pac Bell to knock down its own connection temporarily so he
can dial in.

Mitnick's driving through Victorville when he phones the wiretap.

"WHUUUUUUUU!"

Blowing through wet lips, that's what it always sounds like to
Mitnick, the thousand-cycle pulse of a line waiting for voice to
activate a tap. The pulse has one purpose. When it ends, the tape
recorder spins.

"WHUUUUUUU—"

The pulse stops. The voice he hears is as familiar as his own.

Son of a bitch!

In Mitnick's ear, his own father talking!

He was right about his premonition, it just took a while to mate-
rialize. They took the wiretap off Teltec and put it on his dad's line.

It's all desert to Barstow, and Mitnick floors it, pulling in at the first
gas station on the dusty outskirts of town. His cell phone won't do.
He punches in the number on the pay phone.

"Lew, go to a pay phone and call me back," Mitnick snaps. "The
number is.. ."

He paces back and forth in the piercing desert sun.

Finally it rings.

"Get rid of everything!"

He hangs up, dials his dad.

"Go to the Village market. Call me from the pay phone."

He hangs up, waits for the call.

"Kevin, you're getting paranoid."

"Dad, I just heard your voice on a tap. Get the fucking computer
out of the house!"

What exactly Kevin Mitnick did next is difficult to know for certain.
Messing with Pac Bell or federal wiretaps is a serious crime. But

Lewis De Payne hinted that Mitnick and he pulled off the ultimate
social engineering scam. Only Mitnick or De Payne knows whether
it actually happened, but there's little doubt it was and is possible.
For if Mitnick could trick Pac Bell into letting him know there was a
wiretap on his line, what was stopping him from moving the tap to
someone else's number?

"Say if someone from security were to call the central office and
tell them they need a box moved," De Payne hypothesized. " 'We
put it on the wrong pair . ..' They would certainly comply. And if
somehow that box were to get moved over to the next phone cable
pair, it would likely sit there and no one would notice for a while. It
would keep working and keep recording.

"If that happened, the powers that be wouldn't be very happy
when they finally found out about it. Especially if they spent all their
resources and time analyzing the calls and trying to track all the
outgoing phone numbers.

"No, they wouldn't be very happy at all."

■ a ■

Caller ID is what Pac Bell calls it. When someone dials a Caller ID-
equipped phone it works like a law enforcement trap, spitting back
the number of the caller. There's only one problem. Pac Bell has
never introduced the service in California.

Kevin Mitnick has. Caller ID works just perfectly on his pay
phones. And why shouldn't it? The feature exists, Pac Bell just hasn't
been able to gain the regulatory approval necessary to introduce
Caller ID to the general public.

Mitnick and De Payne lay the trap. Eric has never given them his
home telephone number: he knows they could quickly find out
where he lives. Instead, when they want to reach him they have to
call his beeper and leave their number. They page Eric to call a pay
phone, a number the hacker's never dialed.

Eric dials the number from his apartment. The pay phone rings
and rings and rings. That's all they need.

"Hi, Eric," De Payne cheerfully threatens, telling Eric he's calling
from the Oakwood Apartments pay phone near the pool.

"Do you mind if we come up?"

They've already done a walkby of apartment 107b. They know
the exact apartment number from the phone number they picked up
with Caller ID.

Eric is shocked. He finally manages to speak.

"No. I, I never have hackers up."

"Eric, we need to talk to you about something," De Payne con-
tinues, adopting a serious tone. "We've noticed there are all of these
taps on our lines."

"Look, it will take me a while to come down. I'll meet you down
in the clubhouse room by the pool."

That's OK. Mitnick and De Payne have plenty of time. They wait
in the two-story building at the front of the sprawling stucco com-
plex with the burgundy and teal carpet, the big screen TV, and the
two rows of overstuffed chairs. They've seen the tennis courts, the
lap-swimming-length pool, the groomed professionals and students
on their way to the pool-sized Jacuzzi. Yet something's wrong with
the picture. What's a rocker like Eric doing in a yuppie complex like
this?

Eric strolls in with his torn Levis and his teased hair. He's got the
same look he wears at the strip clubs.

Eric's pissed. "I need you to respect my privacy!" he hisses. "Do
not violate my privacy."

Mitnick's amused. The guy's a hacker. The guy says he wants to
share information. So why get so bent over a little hack?

"There are all of these taps on our lines, Eric," De Payne says.

"What do you mean?"

"There's a tap on Kevin's line. There's a tap on my home line.
There are even taps on my lines at work."

"You're sure?"

"We're sure, Eric," De Payne says. "All seventy-eight lines at my
office are being tapped. That's a lot of taps, Eric."

"OK. I'll check it on Pac Bell's computers," promises Eric. "But I
need you to respect my privacy."

Mitnick and De Payne already know the lines are tapped, but

they're interested by the proposal. What Eric's talking about is ille-
gal, hacking into Pac Bell's proprietary systems, checking for wire-
taps.

Mitnick and De Payne phone Eric a couple of days later on three-
way.

"Eric, we wanted to let you know that we don't need your help,"
De Payne tells him, holding back laughter. "We've already gone in
and checked. The taps
were
on our lines."

But not anymore.

■ ■ a

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