GhostintheWires_MyAdventuresastheWorld’s.epub

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY New York Boston London Begin Reading Table of Contents Photo Inserts 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. FOREWORD 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, ......