The Untold Story of Kevin Mitnick
Childhood
Born on the 6th of August 1963 in California, Kevin suffered in his childhood due to his parents’ divorce and constantly moving to new places. To make things worse, his mum dated a lot of different guys and one of them even molested Kevin. These issues hit him hard and led to him struggling to make friends or connect with people.
Despite these difficulties in life, he definitely didn’t find school hard due to his math and spelling ability being in the top 1% of those his age. Since he found school easy it would often lead to him not paying attention and looking for things outside of the classroom to trigger his mind with one of these being magic.
Magic was his first step towards hacking, he was obsessed with the deception of large groups of people or in other words, social engineering. Unbeknownst to Kevin he was building the foundations to allow him to become a very strong hacker.
While perfecting his magic skills he came across arguably the most important person in his hacking journey Bob, his bus driver. Bob had a passion for ham radios which he passed on to Kevin, who due to his intelligence picked it up incredibly quickly and after a very short time picking up his ham radio license. He became so obsessed with this hobby that he very quickly started skipping school just to allow him to read more about radios.
But how did this all lead to hacking?
Well, Kevin used the bus to travel all over California at this point and wondered how he could get around for free. He took one look at the punch cards they used and figured he could “hack” the system. First, he needed to obtain unpunched cards, which Kevin quickly found in a bin outside of the station. Next, he had to obtain a punching machine, which due to his refined social engineering skills he was able to trick a worker into telling him where to obtain the exact punch. Finally, he got to try out his master plan, and surprise surprise it worked!
While riding the bus, he met a friend named Richard who turned out to be incredibly obese and this led to them stopping to get food up to 6 times a day, inevitably Kevin also became very fat which is unsurprising if all you’re doing is sitting on a bus and eating tacos. Kevin quickly realised this and at 13 years of age decided to use more of his time wisely by reading, however, he didn’t enjoy your normal books, he took a fascination in books that could help him in his future mischief. These books inspired him to try lock-picking. Lock picking was a skill he became extremely well versed in by practicing on lock in his local area, particularly the department store much to the dismay of the nearby residents.
The Downward Spiral
The definitive step towards hacking for Kevin was when he met someone by the name of Steven, who had a love for phreaking, a technique used to allow a hacker to make free telephone calls. Steven taught Kevin an introduction to the world of phreaking and Kevin took it from there finding his way onto a secret network of other phone phreakers.
These types of skills are the same skills that convinced the computer teacher at his school to allow him to take the class. This is when something amazing happened, after a few weeks of taking the class Kevin was able to write a script to steal everyone’s passwords. This would end up being his first brush with the law after the school’s system admin was notified of what he had done, causing police to give Kevin a warning.
Unfortunately, the school didn’t take the same approach and banned him from the computer lab. This didn’t stop Kevin and he even joined a hacker group, and to join this group he had to prove himself as a competent hacker. He was given the challenge to hack into the ark, the system used by the digital systems corporation. The group gave him this challenge as a joke as they knew it was impossible to hack, however, it wasn’t impossible for Kevin who pretended to be another employee and tricked them into creating a new access account for him. Once he gained access he took the login credentials from all the other developers before logging out.
Proud of this achievement he showed off to the other hackers, who kindly decided to snitch on him to the company, but only after stealing the source code. Undeterred by this Kevin decided to hack the US leasing system, again using his social engineering skills pretending to be technical support that had to patch their operating system. Once he had access he made sure to add a backdoor so he could access it any time. But again he was screwed over by a thought-to-be friend who got all the printers to print Mitnick was here.
This so-called friend didn’t just screw him over once though, it happened a second time which led to him spending 90 days in jail, which was only this short due to only being 17 years of age. After being released he was given counselling because they viewed his hacking as an addiction to accessing what he shouldn’t. Even after being locked up it didn’t deter him from hacking, but this led to him being caught again and getting a longer 6-month sentence this time around. It seemed after this longer sentence he was trying to change his ways as he got a job as a software developer at 20th Century Fox. After 2 months at this job, he, unfortunately, got fired.
Not only did this happen but his parole officer also called him to meet, this is due to him being constantly blamed for hacks he hadn’t done, due to a lack of understanding of what he was doing. On this occasion, a guy called the police to say Kevin had hacked into the company he worked for. Kevin was dragged to jail for the 3rd time lasting 60 days, however luckily since there was obviously no evidence he was let go.
And if you haven’t already guessed it he carried on hacking which when we get to the outcome of this story I’m sure you’ll be glad of this. But this wasn’t for long because during lunch with another colleague at the time he recognised some undercover cops, he decided to sneak away. But, that wasn’t all because this had worried Kevin so he decided to social engineer no other than the police themselves, he was able to trick them into disclosing that there was a warrant for his arrest, and worried about this he fled and waited it out. It wasn’t until 4 months later when his attorney called him to let him know it was safe again for him to return.
The Return of Mitnick
Upon his return he decided to attend another school, which is where he met Bonnie a girl who he had taken an interest in, only to find out she was engaged however this engagement wouldn’t last long as Kevin hacked her fiancé and showed that he had been lying about his finances. This led to Kevin and Bonnie dating, talk about mr steal your girl.
He then went on to get a job at the same workplace as her named GTE, coincidently a place he had hacked on multiple occasions. This lasted even shorter than his stint at 20th Century Fox amounting to a total of 9 days after a promotion required a background check. Obviously, the background check was bad news and he was swiftly let go.
He continued to struggle with employment as his name was often recognised. And the icing on the cake was a police raid on Bonnie’s house. The police had taken Kevin’s hard drives which contained information on hacks he had been doing. Worried about how long they had Kevin and Bonnie quickly got married, and now as an added plus Bonnie couldn’t testify against Kevin.
Luckily the worry quickly subsided when charges against Bonnie were dropped and Kevin only got a small fine with 3 years probation. The only issue now was his hard drives had not been returned, which suggested the police were likely to soon find the hacking he had done. This unfortunately came true, but nothing seemed to come of it.
Chaos Computer Club
Kevin continued hacking and during a particular hack of the DEC, where he gained the source code to a new operating system, he found some emails discussing another hacking group known as CCC or the chaos computer club. Interested by their activities Kevin got In contact with the group, in the hopes to learn some new hacking tricks.
By teaming up with the CCC they were able to use the combination of the source code and tools made by CCC to constantly hack the OS whenever a new update came out. And one of the companies that was using the OS was NASA who because they were more competent at security than the other companies Kevin had hacked they noticed, however the blame went towards the CCC instead of Kevin.
But this wouldn’t be the last he heard from a government organisation as again a friend would snitch on him. This friend named Lenny contacted the FBI after Kevin pulled a prank on him by pretending to be the IRS. This would lead to Kevin being sent away for 1 year after Lenny used a wire to get him to confess.
Prison Life
Even in prison he still found ways to hack and socially engineer which even led him having his own telephone installed because he would dial up other numbers while the guards weren’t looking. Not all was good in prison because Bonnie realised it isn’t what she wanted anymore and this led to her filing for divorce. Something that affected Kevin deeply. But that wasn’t the end of it because when he got out he found out it was one of his close friends.
Despite this, he had other things to worry about, such as the FBI. Kevin was worried about them listening in on his calls, so he had to figure out how to conceal his calls. And while at a convention he called his phone company to try and manipulate a way of changing the digital identity of his phone, and low and behold there was a way, but it would be easy since all it took was asking his phone company to send a chip pretending to be a worker doing a demonstration at the convention.
Untraceable
When they arrived without a hiccup he was more than happy. And just a few moments later he tried it out and surprise surprise it worked. He could now make calls without the worry of being traced. As soon as that challenge was over with another obviously popped up in the form of an FBI agent, knowing they were after him he did the only logical thing and tapped the FBI’s phones helping give him a warning to a raid of his apartment, and after getting rid of any evidence he went a bought some donuts as a practical joke towards the FBI leaving them in the fridge with a note reading fbi donuts.
They obviously weren’t too pleased with this and put out a warrant for his arrest only a few months later. Kevin quickly found out and decided he was going to go on the run. And being a big fan of Houdini he chose the name Erich Weisz aka Houdini’s real name as an alias. He also needed somewhere to escape to and his choice was Colorado. His time on the run lasted a total of 3 years. During this time he would hack a guy named Shimomura who didn’t take kindly to this and would make it his goal to bring down Kevin. And Shimomura achieved this when they were able to eventually track down Kevin by his cellular signal and once again he was arrested facing up to 460 years total luckily he took a plea deal bringing it down to 68 months in total being released in January in the year 2000.
And this was the turning point in his story after being released he began to use his skills for good starting work as a consultant doing public speaking and even writing his own book.
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