WHEN KEVIN MITNICK, THE 31-YEAR-OLD computer hacker on the run since 1992, was finally arrested last week, he made a point of telling the man who had helped ensnare him of his admiration. “Hello, Tsutomu, I respect your skills,” he said to Tsutomu Shimomura, the cybersleuth who had cornered Mitnick earlier that day in Raleigh, N.C. It seemed an unusual remark to make to the person responsible for putting him in leg shackles. But not for Mitnick, whose 15-year hacking career was marked by obsessive persistence and a compulsive need to prove his own technical prowess.
Mitnick has been refining his hacking skills for years. He started out in the early 1980s, pulling pranks as a teenage “phone phreak” before moving on to more serious computer crime. He was arrested in 1988 following a hacking binge similar to the most recent one, sentenced to a year in federal prison and, as part of his probation, forbidden from using a computer or modem. But he couldn’t stay away. As the nation’s computers became increasingly interconnected, Mitnick became increasingly sophisticated. He graduated from pay phones to cellular phones, from MCI access codes to the credit-card numbers of Silicon Valley’s rich and famous. By the time of his arrest, it appears, he had stolen thousands of computer files and taken thousands of credit-card numbers belonging to customers of Netcom, an Internet service provider in San Jose, Calif.
Then he went after the files of the 30-year-old Shimomura, an intense, well-respected scientist and computer-security expert at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. A onetime friend of Mitnick’s thinks he targeted Shimomura’s computers precisely because, as a security expert, Shimomura keeps files containing information on security holes–a hacker’s stock in trade. But Mitnick made mistakes, and, with the help of federal investigators and telephone technicians, Shimomura outsmarted Mitnick at his own game. He monitored Mitnick’s every keystroke and eventually traced him to the Raleigh hideout (page 63).
Mitnick represents our worst fears about what hackers can do to our sense of privacy, the security of our computer files, our digital peace of mind. He makes other hackers look like petty shoplifters. He has exposed and exploited the fragile nature of the nation’s computer networks, personifying the dark side of the computer dream. And now that he sits in jail, facing up to 35 years in prison, one can’t help but wonder how many aspiring Mitnicks are lurking in cyberspace.
It’s hard to say. The computer underground has always been a murky place, shrouded in mystique. It’s difficult to speak of numbers, or even to know what hackers are up to until they make themselves as visible as Mitnick has. Certainly, there aren’t many others with Mitnick’s peculiar blend of hubris, drive and years in the trade.
Oddly, he wasn’t after money. He apparently had 20,000 credit-card numbers, but there is no evidence yet that he used even one of them. Shimomura has wondered what is “broken” in Mitnick. An only child whose father left when he was young, Mitnick saw little of his mother and grew up with few friends. Those he did have were fellow phone phreaks and hackers. He married in the 1980s but thought about divorce when his marriage demanded too much time away from his hacking. And, paradoxically, over the years he has wanted to beat the system far less than be a part of it. He has applied for jobs–and even gotten a few–in the computer-security field, only to be discovered as the notorious hacker and quickly fired.
In the end, taking control of others’ computers was the little bit of power Mitnick could claim. He had been a loser all his life and this was one place where he was a winner. But breaking into computers was too trivial. It appears he had to take on Shimomura, one of the best in the field. What he didn’t know was that Shimomura was just as persistent and obsessed as he was.
