Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (11 page)

Bonnie and I both liked Thai food and going to the movies, and she turned me on to hiking, something far out of my normal comfort zone, showing me the beautiful trails in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. She was fascinated by my ability to gather information on people. And one thing more, a coincidence I still laugh at: my new girlfriend was having her salary paid and her tuition covered by one of my principal lifelong hacking targets, the phone company GTE.

After finishing the prescribed half year for my certificate at the computer school, I ended up staying on a bit longer. The system admin, Ariel, had been trying to catch me getting administrator privileges on the school’s VM/CMS system for months. He finally nailed me by hiding behind a curtain in the terminal room while I was snooping inside his directory, catching me red-handed. But instead of booting me out of the program, he offered me a deal: he was impressed with the skills that had
allowed me to hack into the school’s computers, and if I would agree to write programs that would make their IBM minicomputer more secure, he would label it an “honors project.” How about that: the school was training students in the esoteric knowledge of computers, but recruiting a student to improve its own security. That was a big first for me. I took it as a compliment and accepted the assignment. When I finished the project, I graduated with honors.

Ariel and I eventually became friends.

The Computer Learning Center had an inducement it used for signing up students: a number of high-profile companies made a practice of hiring its graduates. And one of them was Bonnie’s employer, GTE, my hacking target for so many years. How fantastic was that!?

After interviewing with GTE’s IT Department, I was brought back for an interview with three people from Human Resources, then offered a job as a programmer. Dreams really did come true! No more hacking for me—I wouldn’t need it. I’d be getting paid for doing what I loved, at the place I loved doing it.

The job began with employee orientation to teach new hires about the names and functions of all the different GTE computer systems. Hello! It was a telephone company: I could have been teaching the classes. But of course I sat there taking notes like everyone else.

Cool new job, a daily quick stroll to the cafeteria for lunch with my girlfriend, a legitimate paycheck—I had it made. Walking through the offices, I’d smile at the hundreds of usernames and passwords that were right in front of my nose, written out on Post-it notes. I was like a reformed drunk on a Jack Daniel’s distillery tour, confident but nearly dizzy from imagining
“What if?”

Bonnie and I would regularly have lunch with a friend of hers, a guy from their Security Department. I was always careful to turn my ID badge around; he obviously hadn’t caught my full name when we were introduced, so why let him read it on my badge like a billboard flashing “Phone Company Public Enemy #1”?

Altogether, this was one of the coolest times of my whole life—who needed hacking?

But only a week after I started, my new boss dropped a bomb on me. He handed me a security form for an all-access badge that would grant
me entry to the data center twenty-four/seven, since I would be on call for emergencies. Immediately, I knew I was going to get canned; as soon as staff from GTE Security looked at my form, they’d recognize my name and wonder how I had bypassed all of their security checks and actually been hired—as a programmer, no less.

A couple of days later, I went to work with a bad gut feeling. Later that morning, my supervisor sent for me, and his boss, Russ Trombley, handed me my paycheck plus severance pay, saying he had to let me go because my references had not checked out. An obvious ruse. I had provided the names only of people who would say good things about me.

I was escorted back to my desk to gather my personal effects. Within minutes, a posse from Security showed up, including the guy who had been having lunch with Bonnie and me. A couple of them started searching my box of floppies for any company property. Whatever. There was none, just legitimate software. The whole posse walked me to the door and all the way to my car. As I drove off into the distance, I glanced in my rearview mirror. They were all waving good-bye.

My career at GTE had lasted a total of nine days.

I heard later that the guys from Pacific Bell Security razzed the hell out of their buddies at GTE, thinking it was hilarious that any company could be stupid enough to hire the notorious phone phreaker Kevin Mitnick—whom Pacific Bell had been keeping a file on for years.

One step back and one step forward. A Computer Learning Center instructor who also worked at Security Pacific National Bank as an Information Security Specialist suggested I apply for a job there. Over a period of weeks, I had three sets of interviews, the last one with a vice president of the bank. Then a fairly lengthy wait. Finally the phone call came: “One of the other candidates has a college degree, but we’ve decided you’re the person we want.” The salary was $34,000, which for me was great!

They sent an in-house memo around that announced, “Please welcome new employee Kevin Mitnick, who starts next week.”

Remember that article in the
Los Angeles Times
, which covered my juvenile arrest and printed my name, a violation of law as well as a violation of my privacy because I was a minor? Well, one of the people at Security Pacific National Bank remembered that article, too.

The day before I was to start, I got a strange call from Sandra Lambert, the lady who’d hired me and who founded the security organization Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). The conversation was actually more like an interrogation:

I had a sinking feeling that the party was over.

My attempt at humor fell. She said good-bye and hung up. I received a phone call from Human Resources the next day withdrawing the employment offer. Once again, my past had come back to bite me in the ass.

Sometime later, media outlets received a press release from Security Pacific National Bank announcing a $400 million loss for the quarter. The release was a phony—it wasn’t really from the bank, which had not in fact lost money in that quarter. Of course the higher-ups at the bank were sure I was behind it. I didn’t learn about any of this until months later, at a court hearing, when prosecutors told the judge that I had committed this malicious act. Thinking back, I remembered telling De Payne that my job offer had been pulled. Years afterward, I asked him if he had been behind that press release. He vehemently denied it. The fact is, I didn’t do it. That wasn’t my style: I’ve never practiced any kind of vicious retribution.

But the phony press release became another part of the Myth of Kevin Mitnick.

Still, I had Bonnie in my life, one of the best things that had ever happened to me. But have you ever felt that something was so good it couldn’t possibly last?

B
onnie recently said that she still remembers “how much fun Kevin was, how sweet he was.”

I felt the same about her. There had been other girls I’d had crushes on, but Bonnie was a first for me in how serious I felt, a first in how much I cared. We enjoyed so many of the same things, even down to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that we’d drive out of our way to pick up at a 7-Eleven on our way home. You probably know the satisfaction when you’re just comfortable and happy being in one particular person’s company. There was no doubt that having her there for me, after those two rapid-fire job losses, was exactly what the doctor ordered. I was spending so much time at her place that I began moving some of my clothes there. We never really decided,
Okay, let’s live together
. It just sort of happened.

We loved biking together. We loved going to the beach with a bottle of wine. We loved hiking in the Chantry Flat, in Arcadia, a beautiful area with waterfalls that’s right in Los Angeles County but feels like being in a forest—really cool, such a refreshing escape for a pale guy like me who sat in front of a computer all day and all night.

I didn’t even mind that she was a lazy housekeeper, with a big pile of her dirty clothes usually occupying space on the bedroom floor. I’ve never been a neat freak like my parents, but I do like things tidy and organized. The two of us were alike in so many other ways that when it came to the condition of the apartment, I just closed my eyes.

Since I didn’t have a job, I signed up for an extension course at UCLA in Westwood, not far from us. Bonnie went with me to register.

But it was a deception—the first time in our relationship that I was, in a sense, cheating on her. I’d go out three evenings a week saying I was going to class, and instead I’d drive over to Lenny DiCicco’s work and hack with him until almost sunup. It was a pretty rotten thing to do.

On the nights when I didn’t go out, I’d sit at my computer in the apartment, using Bonnie’s telephone line for hacking while she read by herself, watched television by herself, and then went to bed by herself. I could say it was my way of handling the disappointment of those two almost-but-oh-never-mind jobs, but I’d be lying. Sure, I was having problems handling the massive disappointment. But that wasn’t the reason. The real reason was simply that I was in the thrall of a powerful obsession.

Though that had to be frustrating for her, she was somehow as accepting as I was about her less-than-admirable housekeeping. After a few months of living together, we both knew we were committed to the relationship. We were in love, we started talking about getting married, and we began saving money. Whatever was left over from my paycheck (I was hired by Fromin’s Delicatessen to migrate them over to a point-of-sale system), I would convert into hundred-dollar bills that I stashed in the inside breast pocket of a jacket in our coat closet.

I was twenty-three years old, living in my girlfriend’s apartment and spending virtually every waking hour on my computer. I was David on my PC, attacking the Goliath networks of the major telephone companies throughout the United States.

The phone company control systems used a bastardized version of Unix, which I wanted to learn more about. A company in Northern California called Santa Cruz Operations, or SCO, was developing a Unix-based operating system called Xenix for PCs. If I could get my hands on a copy of the source code, that would give me a chance to study the inner workings of the operating system on my own computer. From Pacific Bell, I was able to obtain SCO’s secret dial-up numbers for its computer network, and then manipulated an employee into revealing
her username and changing her password to a new password that I had provided, which gave me access.

At one point while immersed in studying the details of SCO’s system trying to locate the source code I wanted to study, I noticed a system admin was watching my every move. I sent him a message, “Why are you watching me?”

To my surprise, he answered: “It’s my job,” his message said.

Just to see how far he’d allow me to go, I wrote back that I wanted my own account on the system. He created an account for me, even giving me the username I requested: “hacker.” Knowing that he’d be keeping the account under surveillance, I just distracted him by poking around at nothing in particular. I was able to locate the code I wanted, but in the end I never tried to download it because the transfer would have taken forever over my 2,400-baud modem.

But that wasn’t going to be the end of this tale.

Bonnie came home from work one day at the beginning of June to find everything in disarray: we had been robbed. She paged me, I called, and I could hear the alarm and upset in her voice.

I asked her to check my coat pocket for the money I’d been saving for our wedding. But then she noticed that my stash of hundred-dollar bills—totaling about $3,000—had been neatly laid out on the kitchen table… along with a search warrant.

We hadn’t been robbed; we’d been raided. By officers of the Santa Cruz Police Department. Santa Cruz! I knew it had to be connected to my nighttime hacking excursions into the computers of Santa Cruz Operations.

When Bonnie said my computer and disks were gone, my world immediately crumbled. I told her to quickly pack some clothes and meet me. I knew there would be a lot of trouble coming my way. I needed to get a lawyer to do damage control. Fast!

Bonnie joined me at a local park, and my mom came, too. I told them both it wasn’t a big deal, since I had just poked around—I hadn’t damaged any of the SCO files or even downloaded their source code. I wasn’t as worried about dealing with the law as I was about the pain and suffering I was bringing down on these two and Gram, the most important people in my life.