Kevin Mitnick is considered one of the most wanted hackers of all time. He played with the community, rode free buses, listened to phone calls, and manipulated McDonald’s car service speakers, and of course gained unauthorized access to dozens of computer networks. But with the sensitive data it uncovered, it never hacked money or did anything malicious. That’s why the FBI wanted to find him so that he could attract him to his side.
How many hacking tricks did he do? and how did the FBI finally catch him? Let’s find out...
From a young age you could say that kevin Mitnick had something special about him. he had found ways to manipulate the system and twisted an arm here and there to get what he wanted.
In 1975, when he was 12 years old, his schoolmates found the first way to hack a community while paying for the bus. Los Angeles Transit was using a punch card system at the time. Your ticket would make a very special hole every time you wanted to get on the bus. however, he realized that all bus drivers were using the same hole puncher, the only piece of information they needed. With a smile on his face, he managed to convince the bus driver that he was working on a school project and asked for a sample hole punch and where he could get his own punch.
Now, with his hole punch, he went diving in the dump near the bus company’s garage for unused transfer slips. From then on he got on the bus for free.
The act of tricking the bus driver actually has a name called social engineering, and what psychologists use as a term to describe people being guided to carry out actions or disclosing confidential information, it turns out that Mitnick was a master even at a younger age. her.
After he finished slaving the Los Angeles transit system, he switched to a new social hacking phone with pH. Before the internet became widely available, phones were one of the most commonly hacked technologies. phone fraud was especially popular from the 60s to the 80s. Hackers learn how phone operating systems work and then find a way to use them. Phone enthusiasts like Kevin can collect sensitive phone numbers, hide their own phone numbers, and even charge complete strangers for their calls.
Mitnick can take such a deep knowledge of telephone systems a step further that it can even mimic dial tones by simply whistling, making a few high-pitched squeaks to make international phone calls without the need for a single penny. .
Although he can use his social and technological hacking abilities for all kinds of illegal activities. He used them mostly for entertainment during his youth. Kevin decided it would be a lot of fun to get into a McDonald’s car speaker with the help of his friend Luis. He managed to override the system using a modified two-way radio, and instead of the car loudspeaker directing it to the cashier’s headset, he directed it to Kevin in the parked car across the street. This meant that customers could respond to their orders by pretending to be employees and play all kinds of jokes. When the cashier realized something was suspicious, he went to investigate. Kevin shouted as he looked into the speaker, what are you looking at on the radio, and guessed that the cashier was terrified.
As you have definitely learned by now, Kevin Mitnick was a talented teenager who had no problem getting lots of pleasure by manipulating systems.
Let’s rewind for a second. Who was this guy, where did he come from and how did he learn all those stylish tricks in the first place?
Well let’s tell you, he was born in Van Nuys, not far from Hollywood. she went to James Monroe High School. meanwhile he became an amateur radio operator. This firsthand experience in the radio room was what helped him understand how electronic wavelengths and signals work. this too was linked to the phone’s escape days. the radio room would also give him access to computer systems and software that most young people around the world had not even heard of.
As technology progressed, Mitnick skills also improved, gaining his first unauthorized access to a computer network in 1979 at the age of 16. this network is Digital Equipment Corporation or Dec. and he copied the company’s software by logging into their system. However, this would come back to haunting him nine years later, when the spoiler alarmed him, he was charged and convicted for it.
Later, in 1981, 17-year-old Kevin and his friends Lewis toupane hacked the host cosmos computer system for Pacific Bell, now an AT&T-owned telephone company. Once Kevin entered the mainframe, he could divert the phone lines and capture any calls from the switchboard. Ordinary people using the Pacific Bell service immediately started complaining about what they thought were mistakes and jokes.
Kevin was fair enough to answer these calls himself and wasn’t afraid to throw a few unpleasant jokes around him. One night, Kevin sneaked into the building where the cosmos had a clear interest in Pacific Bell. received manuals and documents containing a batch of passwords. The plan was simple, take the documents, copy them overnight, return everything to exactly where you found it by morning.
What Kevin did not trust was that Luis told another friend and that friend snapped him to the police. this put Kevin on the watch list. The police put him in jail the next day and was sentenced to three months in prison.
You’d think Kevin would learn his lesson after jail. but no, quite the opposite.
He was once on parole, full of crazy ideas in his head. It goes back to the hacking repository. His next project is to hack the NSA and listen to the world’s largest wiretaps. but it was 1983, that was perhaps the biggest hacking success. While studying at the University of Southern California, possibly a trs-80 computer system using one of the machines at the university. Mitnick gained access to something called ARPANET. Think of it as one of the ancestors of the internet, other than that, the military was devoted to big companies and universities, so it was really important.
Kevin, along with his friend Lenny diCiccio, was pushed forward to 1987, when he gained access to the internal network of his research lab at DEC. This was not an overly complicated hack because Lenny diCiccio was really working there and could point Kevin in the right direction. Of course, access to the system was provided quickly. This time for Kevin was different from previous hacks. it was not infiltrating the web for fun, curiosity, or challenge. There was a goal of hijacking the source code of a particular operating system called VM. Mission completed.
but again, Kevin was caught, if not because of his oversight. because someone else delivered it. It was Lenny diCiccio who betrayed him. He briefed DEC about Kevin’s entry into the company Network and then agreed to become an FBI informant who wired when he invited Kevin to his home to discuss the next phase of his plans.
Kevin was sentenced to one year for this crime and had to participate in a six-month program to treat his computer addiction. Did he make a program? working in hell, not luck.
After more attacks on companies like IBM, Nokia, and Motorola, more arrests and an FBI hunt that took agents all the way to North Carolina. It was found after years of hiding. Mitnick was discovered and arrested at his Raleigh apartment in February 1995. bringing the end of a well-publicized manhunt.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Tsutomu Shimomura, a research scientist, hacked the computer system.
Shimomura is unhappy to be on the receiving side. He followed the hack to a modem attached to a cell tower near Raleigh, and it wasn’t long after hundreds of hacks by police over two decades.
Mitnick was previously charged with 14 wire fraud charges, eight times of possession of unauthorized access devices, seizure of wire and electronic communications, unauthorized access to a federal computer, and damage to a computer. This is a very heavy criminal record.
Following his release, on January 21, 2007, Kevin’s meta fork is on the way. could go on either Rudi was growing up. infiltrate companies, steal information, and ridicule governments or make good use of their abilities. So instead of working against companies, he went exactly 180, a hobby that made him one of America’s Most Wanted. decided to work for them.
The FBI was aware that even though Mitnick had easy access to credit cards, Social Security numbers and special software, it didn’t spend a penny of other people’s money. Credibility was key in her transition from the dark side to the light side.
These days, Mitnick is no longer a hacker, as the governments and telephone companies in the American public fear. He works for the good guys as a paid security consultant speaker and writer. He runs his own security consulting business, which Mitnick calls the absolute zero-day exploit exchange. Kevin provides security consulting for Fortune 500 companies and the FBI and performs a range of security testing services for the world’s largest companies.
Furthermore, he teaches social engineering courses to government institutions and shows them how to take advantage of it and protect themselves from exploitation.
True to his past, but always has a number on his sleeve. The business cards he distributes at events doubles as an unlock kit.
Seriously, as Mitnick said, despite the massive manhunt and hacking of hundreds of companies, you expected less, never wanted to hurt anyone without doing it. I was just having fun, becoming a wizard by breaking systems and getting the code. so I was chasing cell phones, so I got better at hacking them by going after the operating system. and of course not everyone agrees with Kevin’s view of the quote. After all, he spent five years in prison for costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for stealing software from a number of companies, and even on his days of boarding the Los Angeles bus, he was using the best quality of people eager to help a friend.
So what do you think of Kevin, his friend or his fault? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for checking us out. See you next time …