Recommended Preface

The first time I met Kevin Mitnick was in 2001. We participated in the filming of the Discovery Channel documentary "The History of Hackers". We have kept in touch since then. Two years later, I flew to Pittsburgh to moderate his lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. There, I marveled at his legendary hacking career. He hacked into corporate computers but did not destroy files or use or sell the credit card information he gained access to. He stole the software source codes but never sold them. He engaged in hacking activities just as a hobby and to challenge himself.

In Mitnick's speech, he reviewed in detail his wonderful past of "hacking" the FBI's action plan against him. Mitnick accurately grasped the FBI's information through penetration. Throughout the operation, he discovered that his new hacker "friend" was actually an FBI informant, and found out the names and home addresses of all FBI agents involved in the plan, and even attempted eavesdropping on phone communications and voicemails. Conversations about him gathering evidence. When the FBI was preparing to arrest him, Mitnick used the alarm system that had been established within the FBI to obtain this information and escaped.

When the producers of the television show The Screen Saver asked Mitnick and me to host a feature, they asked me to demonstrate a new electronic device that had just been introduced to the market - the GPS. Being asked to drive while they were tracking me, footage from the scene showed me just driving down a seemingly random path:

FREE KEVIN

We We met again in 2006, when Mitnick was the guest host of Art Bell's talk show Coast to Coast AM and invited me as a special guest to record with him. I listened to him at that time. Many hacking stories, and he also interviewed me about some of my hacking experiences that night, leaving many wonderful memories of us laughing at each other.

My life has also changed a lot because of the influence of Mitnick. One day I suddenly realized that I always received international long-distance calls from him from all over the world: He published in Russia Lectures, helping a company solve security problems in Spain, and providing security consulting services in Chile for a bank he had hacked. These experiences sound so cool! Before these enlightening calls from Mitnick, I had not used a passport for more than ten years! Mitnick put me in touch with the agent who helped him arrange speaking engagements, and the agent told me, "We can also arrange some speaking engagements for you." So I have to give Mitnick a big thank you, and I'm already like him He also became an international traveler.

Mitnick is one of my best friends and I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with him and listening to his legendary stories about his invasions and adventures. He has had a life that is as colorful and compelling as any good Hollywood movie with all the ups and downs.

You can come and share one wonderful story after another that I have heard over the years. In a way, I will be jealous of the journey you are about to start because you can In a short time, enter the unparalleled and even incredible life story of Kevin Mitnick.

Steve Wozniak

Co-founder of Apple

Preface

"Physical Intrusion ", that is, sneaking into the office building of the target organization. This is something I have never been willing to do, because the risk of this method of intrusion is too high. Just looking back on these past events almost makes me break out in cold sweat.

However, I have done such a thing before. It was a warm night in spring, and I was lurking in the dark parking lot outside the office building of a billion-dollar company, waiting for the opportunity to make a move. I had entered the building in broad daylight a week earlier, under the pretense of delivering a letter to a company employee, but the real purpose was just to get a closer look at their badge. This company prints employees' photos in the upper left corner of their badges, with their first name below the photo, and their last name first in bold. The company's name is on the bottom of the badge in bold red font.

Then I went to the Kodak print shop, downloaded the company's logo image from the company's website, then scanned a photo of myself, and spent about 20 minutes to Photoshop it to look exactly the same. The badge was put into a plastic sleeve bought from a merchandise store. I also forged a badge for a friend who agreed to go on the adventure with me.

Here’s a word of advice: we don’t even need to make it exactly the same, because 99% of the time your fake badge will be glanced at, as long as the most basic elements are in the right place , you can easily get away with it... Unless you encounter some over-energetic security guards or employees with security patrol roles who insist on carefully checking your badge, you will be in danger. Gonna enjoy the prison life I've been through.

In the parking lot, I hid out of sight and secretly observed the diffuse smoke created by groups of smokers who came out to satisfy their cravings. Finally, I selected a group of about five or six smokers to start. Time to set off back to the building. The back door of the building is a security door that can be opened automatically by employees using their badges. As the team walked through the door one by one, I followed them quietly. After the guy in front of me entered, he noticed that there were people behind him. He glanced at me and saw that I was wearing my company badge, so he opened the door for me. I smiled and responded with a "thank you."

This technique is called "tailgating".

After entering the building, the first thing that caught my sight was a security warning sign, reminding not to leave the door open for anyone, but requiring everyone to verify their badge to gain access. But common etiquette and daily etiquette toward "colleagues" mean that the warnings in safety warning signs are often ignored.

In the hallway of the building, I looked like I was striding straight toward a certain destination, but in fact I was searching for information technology (IT) support on the way to an intrusion. office. About 10 minutes later, I found an area on the west side of the building. I had done my homework beforehand and got the name of a network engineer in this company. I guessed that he might have full administrative rights to the company's network. .

Oops! When I found his workspace, I found that it was not a workstation grid that was easy to sneak into as expected, but an independent office with a locked door. But I found a solution. The ceiling of the room is made up of those white soundproof square panels. These square panels are usually suspended ceiling decorations to block the pipes, wires, air conditioning holes, etc. above the suspended ceiling. There is a climbing platform above the suspended ceiling. The passage in.

I called my partner for support and went back to the back door to pick him up. He was a tall, lanky guy who wanted to help with something I couldn't do. Back in the IT department, he climbed onto a table and I held his legs and lifted him up so he could pry up a square board and move it to the side, then I struggled to lift him higher. , let him grab an upper pipe and climb up. Within a minute, I heard him jump down in the locked office, open the door from the inside, and stand in front of me, his face covered with black ash. , grinning.

I immediately entered the office and closed the door gently. We are safer and probably harder to detect. The office is dark and it would be dangerous to turn on the light, but it is unnecessary because the engineer's computer is on and its light is enough to help us see what we need, which can reduce the risk. I did a quick search of his desk and checked the first few pages of sticky notes and under the keyboard for sticky notes with computer passwords. Not so lucky, but that's not a problem for me.

I pulled out a Linux operating system boot CD containing a hacking toolset from my backpack, put it in the CD-ROM drive, and rebooted. A tool in the CD allows me to directly change the local administrator password of this computer. I changed the password so that I could log in, then took out the CD and restarted the computer, and I easily logged in to the local administrator account.

As quickly as I could, I installed a "remote control trojan", a piece of malicious code that gave me full access to the machine so I could monitor keylogging and Capture password cipher text and even control the camera to take photos of computer users.

The Trojan I installed initiated an Internet connection to a host I controlled every few minutes, allowing me to gain full control of the controlled system.

After completing this, I entered the registry of this computer and set the "Last logged in user" to the engineer's user name, so that I don't have to worry about leaving any information when logging in to the local administrator account. evidence. Tomorrow morning, the engineer may find that his account lock has been logged out, but it should not be a big problem. As long as he logs again, everything will look like it should happen, without any flaws.

I was ready to leave. My partner had already reset the moved square panels on the ceiling. After I went out, I locked the door again.

The next morning, the engineer turned on his computer at about 8:30, and the computer initiated and established a connection to my laptop. Because the Trojan was running under his account, I had full domain management rights, and it only took me a few seconds to find the domain control server, the key server that stored the passwords for all the company's accounts. Using a hacking tool called "fgdump", I was able to extract the password ciphertext of every user in the company.

Within a few hours, I ran this list through the "Rainbow Table" - a huge database of precomputed passwords - and cracked the passwords of most of the company's employees. I eventually found one of the company's backend servers used to handle customer requests, only to find that the credit card numbers were encrypted. This wasn't a problem for me either: I found another "SQL Server" server running a stored procedure in the database, and eventually found the key stored there that was used to encrypt the credit card number, and this key was Any database administrator can directly access and obtain it.

Millions of credit card numbers! I can grab a different credit card at a time and spend all day long without worrying about maxing them out!

But I didn’t use those credit cards for any purchases, and this true story is not a reenactment of the hack that got me into trouble. Rather, it was the work I was hired to do for a good salary.

This is what we call a "pen test", which is short for penetration testing, and penetrated their most secure computer systems, yet I was hired by these large companies to help them eliminate security risks and improve their security so that they will not become the target of being "hacked" next time.

I am largely self-taught, having spent many years learning methods, tactics, and strategies for defeating computer security mechanisms, and learned much about the inner workings of how computer and telecommunications systems work.

My passion and obsession with technology kept me going on a rocky road, and my hacking shenanigans cost me over five years of valuable time in prison and gave me the life I loved. People suffered tremendous grief.

This is my story, drawn from my memories and private diaries, from public court transcripts and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, from FBI phone wiretaps and surveillance records, from numerous interviews , and discussions with two government whistleblowers, I will try to restore every detail as accurately as possible.

This is the legendary story of how I became the world’s most wanted hacker.