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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, 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:

FREE KEVIN

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.

PROLOGUE

Physical 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