Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [198]
Although my friend Alex Kasperavicius was never really a hack, he was always willing to be brought into my hacking projects, usually to participate in some exciting social-engineering project. Later we developed a social-engineering workshop to help businesses identify and mitigate the risk of social-engineering attacks, and delivered these workshops at businesses around the globe. We even had the honor of training the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in Oklahoma City. In late 2000, we hosted a popular Internet talk radio show called The Darkside of the Internet on KFI-AM 640 in Los Angeles. Thank you, Alex. You have been a loyal and trusted friend.
Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein) has been a friend and supporter for almost two decades. He launched the “Free Kevin” movement in early 1998 after I had been detained for over three years. Eric contributed substantial effort, time, and money in getting the word out during my incarceration in Federal detention. He also created a documentary entitled Freedom Downtime, released in 2001, which documented the “Free Kevin” movement and even won an award for best documentary at a New York film festival. Eric, your kindness, generosity, and friendship mean more to me than words can express. Thank you for everything and for being there for me.
I want to acknowledge my ex-hacking partner Lewis De Payne for taking the time to refresh my memory on several past hacking adventures that we both participated in. Thank you, Lewis. It has been a long and crazy adventure for both of us and I truly wish you the best.
My close friend Christine Marie assisted me with the initial rough draft of the Afterword included at the end of the book. Thank you, Christine, for your participation and effort.
I wish to thank my close friends Kat and Matt Wagenknecht for working with me to develop the codes that appear at the beginning of each chapter. Great work! Let’s see how many readers are able to solve the puzzles and win some prizes.
I wish to thank Jari Tomminen for allowing me to use a photo he had taken of me in Helsinki, Finland, for the Ghost in the Wires book jacket.
I want to acknowledge my friend and security expert David Kennedy, who was kind enough to review a section of this book and provide me with good advice.
Thank you, Alan Luckow, for allowing me to include in my book a picture of the drawing you made, which was on the gift wrapping that covered the box that contained the Apple PowerBook G4 that Steve Wozniak gave me on The Screen Savers show.
Thanks to the social-networking site Twitter, I was able to find a few volunteers willing to take some photographs for the book. I wish to thank Nick Arnott, Shellee Hale, John Lester, aka Count Zero, Michelle Tackabery, and several others for their kind contributions and for volunteering their time. For those of you who wish to follow me on Twitter, please visit twitter.com/kevinmitnick.
I want to thank my former Federal prosecutor, David Schindler, who was kind enough to take the time to allow me to interview him for my book.
I also wish to thank Justin Petersen, aka Eric Heinz, and Ronald Mark Austin, who were kind enough to allow me to interview them for my book. A short time after Bill Simon and I interviewed Justin Petersen, he was found deceased in his apartment in West Hollywood, possibly because of a drug overdose. It’s a shame he suffered the same fate as my brother, who had me initiate contact with Petersen when Justin was using the alias Eric Heinz.
And as I write these acknowledgments, I realize I have so many people to thank and to express appreciation to for offering their love, friendship, and support. I cannot begin to remember the names of all the kind and generous people I’ve met in recent years, but suffice it to say, I would need a flash drive to store them all. There have been so many people from all over the world who have