A hacker tells all

Considering the fact that Windows 95 hadn’t even been released when federal agents finally caught up with the computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, one might assume his new memoir would be full of stale old tech-and-­techniques that no one in 2011 could possibly care about. But as Mitnick makes clear here, don’t jump to conclusions.

While he excelled at infiltrating computer systems from a keyboard and had a sharp memory for numbers, Ghost in the Wires (written with William L Simon) really showcases another of Mitnick’s skills: social engineering, or what he describes as “the casual or calculated manipulation of people to influence them to do things they would not ordinarily do”. By doing his research and impersonating authority figures over the phone or by e-mail, Mitnick found he could persuade just about anybody – programmers, technicians, even the nice lady at the Social Security Administration – to give him the things he wanted, like passwords, computer chips and personal information about FBI informants on his tail. “People, as I had learned at a very young age, are just too trusting,” he writes.

It’s this element to his story that makes the book read like a contemporary über-geeky thriller. Many of today’s computer viruses and identity-theft scams depend on social engineering mixed with a misuse of technology to dupe the unsuspecting. In that regard, Mitnick’s memoir also serves as a wake-up call for anyone trying to keep personal information private. (Out of prison since 2000, Mitnick now works as a security ­consultant.)

Kevin Mitnick grew up as an only child of divorced parents, moving frequently in the Los Angeles area. He was something of a loner, and his early pursuits included studying magic tricks and ham radio. When he was 12, the revelation that he could ride the local bus system free with a $15 punch and books of half-used blank transfer tickets fished out of a Dumpster behind the bus depot gave him a sense of what he could do (legal or otherwise) if he put his mind to it.

In high school, Mitnick developed an obsession with the inner workings of the telephone company’s switches and circuits, a hobby known as “phone phreaking” (and one that was shared by the future Apple founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their own formative years).

By the time he was 17, in 1981, Mitnick was happily spending his time on things like persuading a Pacific Telephone employee to give him Lucille Ball’s home number and burrowing into different corporate computer systems. It was then that he had his first run-in with the authorities for his activities. Thus began a nearly 20-year cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement that makes up much of the book.

Driven by curiosity and compulsion, Mitnick spent most of his young adulthood pilfering proprietary code from technology companies like Sun Microsystems and Novell, partly so he could look for bugs and security holes to use to his advantage, and partly for the thrill of the hunt. He also spent plenty of time making free calls on his hacked cellphone and going to the gym. As the authorities began to close in on him in 1992, he created several false identities, and went on the run until he was finally nailed in February 1995.

When not recounting his clever exploits, Mitnick devotes chunks of the book to defiantly rebutting myths that became attached to him — for example, that he had hacked into government computer systems.

He mocks some of the more incredible accusations levelled at him by the authorities: that he had repeatedly turned off the phone service of the actress Kristy McNichol, and that he could “whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile from Norad”. (Mitnick surmises that the federal prosecutor who made the latter claim probably mixed him up with Matthew Broderick’s youthful computer enthusiast in the 1983 cold-war thriller WarGames.)

For those interested in computer history, Ghost in the Wires is a nostalgia trip to the quaint old days before hacking (and hackers) turned so malicious and financially motivated. Unlike computer criminals today, Mitnick ignored the credit card numbers he stumbled across in his pursuit of code. He writes: “Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent. You don’t have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.” He summed up his personal motive to the former Wall Street trader Ivan Boesky when they were both in prison: “I didn’t do it for the money; I did it for the ­entertainment.”

GHOST IN THE WIRES
My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker
Kevin Mitnick
with William L Simon
Little, Brown & Company
413 pages; $25.99

©2011 The New York Times News Service