Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

L
ITTLE
, B
ROWN AND
C
OMPANY

New York   Boston   London

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Copyright Page

For my mother and grandmother

—
K.D.M
.

For Arynne, Victoria, and David,
Sheldon, Vincent, and Elena Rose
and especially for Charlotte

—
W.L.S
.

I
met Kevin Mitnick for the first time in 2001, during the filming of a Discovery Channel documentary called
The History of Hacking
, and we continued the contact. Two years later, I flew to Pittsburgh to introduce him for a talk he was giving at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was dumbfounded to hear his hacking history. He broke into corporate computers but didn’t destroy files, and he didn’t use or sell credit card numbers he had access to. He took software but never sold any of it. He was hacking just for the fun of it, just for the challenge.

In his speech, Kevin spelled out in detail the incredible story of how he had cracked the case of the FBI operation against him. Kevin penetrated the whole operation, discovering that a new hacker “friend” was really an FBI snitch, learning the names and home addresses of the entire FBI team working his case, even listening in on the phone calls and voicemails of people trying to gather evidence against him. An alarm system he had set up alerted him when the FBI was preparing to raid him.

When the producers of the TV show
Screen Savers
invited Kevin and me to host an episode, they asked me to demonstrate a new electronic device that was just then coming onto the consumer market: the GPS. I was supposed to drive around while they tracked my car. On the air, they displayed a map of the seemingly random route I had driven. It spelled out a message:

We shared the microphones again in 2006, when Kevin was the stand-in host of Art Bell’s talk show
Coast to Coast AM
and invited me to join him as his on-air guest. By then I had heard a lot of his story; that
night he interviewed me about mine and we shared many laughs, as we usually do when we’re together.

My life has been changed by Kevin. One day I realized that I was getting his phone calls from faraway places: he was in Russia to give a speech, in Spain to help a company with security issues, in Chile to advise a bank that had had a computer break-in. It sounded pretty cool. I hadn’t used my passport in about ten years until those phone calls gave me an itch. Kevin put me in touch with the agent who books his speeches. She told me, “I can get speaking engagements for you, too.” So thanks to Kevin, I’ve become an international traveler like him.

Kevin has become one of my best friends. I love being around him, hearing the stories about his exploits and adventures. He has lived a life as exciting and gripping as the best caper movies.

Now you’ll be able to share all these stories that I have heard one by one, now and then through the years. In a way, I envy the experience of the journey you’re about to start, as you absorb the incredible, almost unbelievable tale of Kevin Mitnick’s life and exploits.

—Steve Wozniak,
cofounder, Apple, Inc.

P
hysical entry”: slipping into a building of your target company. It’s something I never like to do. Way too risky. Just writing about it makes me practically break out in a cold sweat.

But there I was, lurking in the dark parking lot of a billion-dollar company on a warm evening in spring, watching for my opportunity. A week earlier I had paid a visit to this building in broad daylight, on the pretext of dropping off a letter to an employee. The real reason was so I could get a good look at their ID cards. This company put the employee’s head shot upper left, name just below that, last name first, in block letters. The name of the company was at the bottom of the card, in red, also in block letters.

I had gone to Kinko’s and looked up the company’s website, so I could download and copy an image of the company logo. With that and a scanned copy of my own photo, it took me about twenty minutes working in Photoshop to make up and print out a reasonable facsimile of a company ID card, which I sealed into a dime-store plastic holder. I crafted another phony ID for a friend who had agreed to go along with me in case I needed him.

Here’s a news flash: it doesn’t even have to be all that authentic looking. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it won’t get more than a glance. As long as the essential elements are in the right place and look more or less the way they are supposed to, you can get by with it… unless, of course, some overzealous guard or an employee who likes to play the role of security watchdog insists on taking a close look. It’s a danger you run when you live a life like mine.

In the parking lot, I stay out of sight, watching the glow of cigarettes from the stream of people stepping out for a smoke break. Finally I spot
a little pack of five or six people starting back into the building together. The rear entrance door is one of those that unlock when an employee holds his or her access card up to the card reader. As the group single-files through the door, I fall in at the back of the line. The guy ahead of me reaches the door, notices there’s someone behind him, takes a quick glance to make sure I’m wearing a company badge, and holds the door open for me. I nod a thanks.

This technique is called “tailgating.”

Inside, the first thing that catches my eye is a sign posted so you see it immediately as you walk in the door. It’s a security poster, warning not to hold the door for any other person but to require that each person gain entrance by holding up his card to the reader. But common courtesy, everyday politeness to a “fellow employee,” means that the warning on the security poster is routinely ignored.

Inside the building, I begin walking corridors with the stride of someone en route to an important task. In fact I’m on a voyage of exploration, looking for the offices of the Information Technology (IT) Department, which after about ten minutes I find in an area on the western side of the building. I’ve done my homework in advance and have the name of one of the company’s network engineers; I figure he’s likely to have full administrator rights to the company’s network.

Damn! When I find his workspace, it’s not an easily accessible cubicle but a separate office… behind a locked door. But I see a solution. The ceiling is made up of those white soundproofing squares, the kind often used to create a dropped ceiling with a crawl space above for piping, electrical lines, air vents, and so on.

I cell-phone to my buddy that I need him, and make my way back to the rear entrance to let him in. Lanky and thin, he will, I hope, be able to do what I can’t. Back in IT, he clambers onto a desk. I grab him around the legs and boost him up high enough that he’s able to raise one of the tiles and slide it out of the way. As I strain to raise him higher, he manages to get a grip on a pipe and pull himself up. Within a minute, I hear him drop down inside the locked office. The doorknob turns and he stands there, covered in dust but grinning brightly.

I enter and quietly close the door. We’re safer now, much less likely to be noticed. The office is dark. Turning on a light would be dangerous but it isn’t necessary—the glow from the engineer’s computer is enough
for me to see everything I need, reducing the risk. I take a quick scan of his desk and check the top drawer and under the keyboard to see if he has left himself a note with his computer password. No luck. But not a problem.

From my fanny pack, I pull out a CD with a bootable version of the Linux operating system that contains a hacker toolkit and pop it into his CD drive, then restart the computer. One of the tools allows me to change the local administrator’s password on his computer; I change it to something I know, so I can log in. I then remove my CD and again restart the computer, this time logging in to the local administrator account.

Working as fast as I can, I install a “remote access Trojan,” a type of malicious software that gives me full access to the system, so I can log keystrokes, grab password hashes, and even instruct the webcam to take pictures of the person using the computer. The particular Trojan I’ve installed will initiate an Internet connection to another system under my control every few minutes, enabling me to gain full control of the victim’s system.

Almost finished, as a last step I go into the registry of his computer and set “last logged-in user” to the engineer’s username so there won’t be any evidence of my entry into the local administrator account. In the morning, the engineer may notice that he’s logged out. No problem: as soon as he logs back in, everything will look just as it should.

I’m ready to leave. By now my buddy has replaced the overhead tiles. On the way out, I reset the lock.

The next morning, the engineer turns on his computer at about 8:30 a.m., and it establishes a connection to my laptop. Because the Trojan is running under his account, I have full domain administrator privileges, and it takes me only a few seconds to identify the domain controller that contains all the account passwords for the entire company. A hacker tool called “fgdump” allows me to dump the hashed (meaning scrambled) passwords for every user.