08.08.2025
13 min
974
The third part of the biography of Kevin Mitnick reveals a lesser-known but extremely important period of his life. This is a story not only about hacks and technical mastery, but also about personal challenges that became the driving force for future achievements and risks. We see Mitnick as a teenager searching for himself, facing his first serious feelings and learning to act despite circumstances.
In the last article, we left Kevin Mitnick at the moment when everything seemed to be getting better for him. He had solved his teenage problems with the law, had twice successfully poked his nose into the US National Security Agency, had finally received a grant for professional programming training, and had even started using an assembler. Kevin was already thinking about giving up hacking and phreaking – hacking telephone networks, which was his main hobby in his youth. But … If he had managed to get off the hook then, we wouldn’t be writing a biography of the most famous hacker of the 90s now, right?
So, 1986. Kevin Mitnick continued to study at a computer school and study programming languages. Of course, in those years his classmates were mostly boys, but sometimes he met girls. Among them was a miniature Italian girl named Bonnie Vitello, to whom our hero fell in love. The obstacle was that Bonnie was beautiful and popular, and Kevin … Well, Kevin had loved fast food since he was a teenager – as a result, he became rounder and rounder every year.
At first, Mitnik was sure that he had literally nothing to catch here – but courage and ingenuity came to his aid here too. The first trick, however, was very geeky: Kevin tried to attract the attention of his passion by asking her not to complete the execution of his programs on the work computer, which have a high priority. And when he decided to directly indicate his interest, he received a polite refusal: it turned out that Bonnie was already engaged. Well, this is a challenge, Kevin decided!
To begin with, Mitnik continued to communicate anyway – and after a while he found out that Bonnie suspected her fiancé of hiding something about his finances and debts. Find out other people’s secrets? Ha! You’ve found the very person who loves, knows how and practices it. Kevin hacked into the TRW credit company system, and also found discarded credit reports of potential buyers in the trash at the Ford dealership – with the access codes to the system kindly left behind. Wow, and very soon Mitnik had the complete credit history of a competitor for Bonnie’s hand and heart. As expected, his friend was up to his neck in debt, although he portrayed himself as a wealthy macho. The engagement was broken off, and Bonnie began to sympathize even more with her hacker friend.
Literally a few weeks after breaking up with her fiancé, Kevin became her new boyfriend. The fact that Bonnie was six years older than Kevin only worked to her advantage: she was more experienced and knew how to organize relationships, while our hero was still a lamer in his personal sense. Perhaps the couple of a fragile Italian beauty and a heavy geek looked a little questionable by the standards of the chic female and male bodies of California in the 80s, but the first few months were happy. They devoured tons of Thai cuisine, and in order not to round her boyfriend even more, Bonnie accustomed him to long walks along the picturesque mountain trails of the San Gabriel Range.
It turned out that Bonnie works at the same company GTE, where Kevin Mitnik literally dreamed of getting a job – and for this he was ready to give up hacking and phreaking to strengthen his heart. However, he clearly lacked self-control. For example, he deliberately stayed late for his studies at a computer school to hack the school network and secure administrator rights for himself. A sysadmin named Ariel caught him for this interesting activity. But instead of a scandal and being expelled with shame, he suddenly suggested to Kevin… to improve the network security system, and even count it as his thesis. Mitnik happily agreed and received a diploma with honors.
In his memoirs, Mytnik recalled this moment:
School graduates were usually invited to work at large companies. One of these companies was GTE, where Bonnie worked, and I hacked systems. Isn’t it amazing? I was interviewed by IT specialists, then I endured another conversation with three HR people with dignity. After all, I was offered a job as a programmer. Dreams really do come true sometimes! No more hacking: I simply won’t need it. I will be paid for what I love to do, and exactly where I want to do it!
Mytnik worked at GTE for a long time. Nine whole days. Then the security service came for him, accompanied by the same manager who had conducted the interview. Kevin was told he was fired, thoroughly searched, his floppy disks were checked to make sure they contained no corporate secrets or codes, and taken with his belongings to his car in the parking lot. As Kevin later found out, the GTE security service had acquaintances in the security service of the Pacific Bell company he had hacked, who began to resent their colleagues for the fact that their management had personally introduced a well-known and dangerous hacker into the corporation.
Kevin didn’t give up here either: he honestly intended to quit hacking and get a job. He tried to become an information security specialist at Security Pacific Bank. Kevin’s skills impressed the company, and he was offered a very solid salary of $34,000. However, even here there were reinsurers in the security service who dug into our hero’s hacking background. The company asked if Kevin owned the call sign WA6VPS and whether he had a bad habit of digging in garbage cans near offices… after which they cut off his employment just “just in case”.
All these were strong blows for Kevin, which were smoothed out only by his excellent relationship with Bonnie. The two boots turned out to be a couple, got together and lived literally soul to soul, cracking peanut butter, walking around the surrounding hills and picturesquely cluttering up the apartment: both of them were too lazy to clean up, but “it’s normal anyway.” However, Kevin, plunging into a gloomy state from his job failures, gradually began to cheat on Bonnie – naturally, not with other girls, but with his favorite illegal pastime and still best friend Lenny di Cicco. He also took advanced training courses at the University of Southern California, but in reality, instead of studying, he sat with Lenny and enthusiastically hacked.
Then Kevin’s addiction to hacking systems took hold again, so much so that he began to spend more and more time at home on his computer while Bonnie watched TV or read. Part of Kevin’s excuse was that he finally got a part-time job at Fromin’s Delicatessen, where he helped improve electronic accounting mechanisms… And along the way, he tried to hack the systems of the telephone company Santa Cruz Operations (SCO). They were improving a version of Unix, Xenix, specially optimized for the functionality of telephone companies – and our hero was eager to fully understand this thing at the development stage in order to further hack everything and everything.
Using the usual social engineering methods, Kevin found out the login and password for access to the SCO network through Pacific Bell (mwa-ha-ha), after which he dug there in search of the source code of their version of Xenix. The local sysadmin was so kind that, having discovered Kevin in the system, he himself said that he saw him, because “that’s the way it is” – and even created his own account for him with the nickname “Hacker”. Kevin, carefully portraying the idle curiosity of an amateur, did find the source code of the system, but it turned out to be too heavy for his modem. At least, that’s what Kevin himself later assured.
And everything would be fine, but Bonnie, who soon returned home, found the apartment turned upside down. The first thought was that thieves had broken in. However, it later turned out that the dollar bills from Kevin’s stash were carefully laid out on the table. Next to them lay an official search warrant from the police computer crime unit. But Kevin’s computer was gone, and all his disks were gone. It was a disaster. Worse, the police were coming to Bonnie’s office to question her about breaking into the SCO headquarters from her apartment.
Kevin was in a panic. In addition to the next problems for his fifth point, he was extremely worried that he had literally framed his girlfriend (we will leave the question of what he was thinking when he went online with her IP behind the scenes), and he was sure that after that she would definitely leave him. He also threw problems at his mother and grandmother, who had to urgently look for a lawyer. Kevin was sitting in a hotel with Bonnie at that time, and they were either crying on each other’s shoulders or breaking the bed in attempts to distract themselves. To Kevin’s surprise, Bonnie did not accuse him of fabulous idiocy and irresponsibility, but said that they needed to go through this together. In his memoirs, Mytnik honestly admits that Bonnie loved him, and he behaved like an asshole.
After speaking with lawyers, Bonnie and Kla… sorry, Kevin appeared at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office in West Hollywood and gave evidence. Chica’s aunt posted a $5,000 bond. In the following months of 1987, the couple hardly parted with lawyers, repeatedly went to court hearings and spent all their stash, and were also forced to borrow from Kevin’s relatives.
In these unhappy conditions, they played a wedding: not so much for romantic reasons as for legal reasons. As a couple, Bonnie and Kevin had the right not to testify in court against each other, and Bonnie could also visit Kevin in prison – where he would most likely end up.
In addition to the criminal charges, SCO sued both Kevin and Bonnie for $1.4 million each for “damages caused.” However, the company agreed to drop these lawsuits if Kevin told them how he had so ingeniously managed to get into their system. In an official conversation with the company’s sysadmin, Mitnik honestly admitted that he had not hacked anything as a hacker, but had used social engineering methods and, under a convincing pretext, had learned the login and password from an employee of Pacific Bell.
Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls and secure access devices, and they are wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, and manage computer systems.
As a result, everything was limited to two years of probation and a fine of $216 for Kevin and the complete dismissal of the charges against Bonnie. Kevin also had to officially promise not to commit any more offenses.
But Kevin’s disks, unlike the computer, were not returned, and they contained enough evidence for new charges. Through the cops, the disks ended up in the Pacific Bell security service. They were extremely impressed by the contents, but did not present anything to Customs and only sent an instructive letter to their offices listing his adventures and who and how of the employees he continued with. Kevin managed to get the text of the letter, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end: at the request of the corporation’s management, they should have dealt with all this not with ordinary Santa Cruz County cops, but with the FBI.
decryption of information that I illegally obtained from all computers of the Southern California Switching Centers (SCC) and Electronic Systems Service Centers (ESAC); the file lists the names, logins, passwords, and home phone numbers of employees working in the Electronic Systems Service Centers throughout Southern and Northern California;
dial-up numbers and documents for identifying the communication channels of the switching centers and cables for synchronizing PCs;
commands for testing and seizing lines, automatic trunk test channels;
commands and logins for the Northern and Southern California switching centers;
commands for controlling lines and seizing the “station answer” signal, i.e., a long beep;
mentions of masquerading as agents of the Southern California security services and employees of the Electronic Systems Service Centers in order to obtain information;
commands for creating interruptions of outgoing and incoming calls;
Pacific Bell complex addresses and codes for opening the electronic locks of the following central offices located in Southern California: ELSG12, LSAN06, LSAN12, LSAN15, LSAN56, AVLN11, HLWD01, HWTH01, IGWD01, LOMT1;
corporate e-mails describing new login and password procedures and security measures;
analytical table of the hacker file program – UNIX encryption reader; if successfully decrypted, this tool allows you to break any UNIX program.
The following year, Kevin held on as best he could. He got a job at Franmark; Bonnie continued to work at GTE, although she suspected that she was under very close surveillance by the security services. The couple began saving for their own house and moved in with Kevin’s mother to save money—with obvious consequences for family life in the almost constant presence of their hyperactive mother-in-law.
To cope with the stress, Kevin… no, he didn’t propose living apart again, didn’t start exercising, didn’t go to a therapist, and didn’t start taking antidepressants. He got back together with Lenny, and his hacker buddies couldn’t think of anything better than to get back into hacking. This time, at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Kevin and Lenny enrolled in a computer class at Pierce College and first hacked a terminal there, trying to copy the Micro VAX virtual memory system. True, it could only be copied onto a reel of magnetic tape, the process took several hours, and Kevin was warned in time that Professor Schlippenbach had noticed the ugliness and wanted to ambush the attackers.
As a result, Kevin and Lenny did not go to pick up the reel, but they still fell under suspicion – reputation, you know. After that, the friends discovered that a real hunt had begun for them. The cops literally escorted them to their homes in the evenings, and sometimes even appeared on the roofs of college buildings, peering through binoculars at what a couple of hackers were doing.
Later, Kevin, through the same social engineering, managed to find out that while they were trying to hack DEC systems, the corporation’s security service had already cooperated with the police to catch them in the act of hacking. DEC even introduced an employee to the college who monitored Kevin and Lenny through computer systems from a specially designated room.
Even Kevin and Lenny’s personal accounts and directories in the college system were under the control of DEC programmers. And here Kevin could not help but joke. He wrote a simple script that listed the files in his directory over and over again. Since all actions in the suspect catalogs were recorded and printed, the poor agent soon found himself literally covered in paper from a printer that was running continuously. Formally, this was not a crime (Kevin and Lenny tried very hard not to get burned by anything since they discovered they were being monitored), but they were still expelled from college for the totality of evidence and suspicion.
It would seem that literally everything was screaming at Kevin that it was time to stop. In California, he was known as a hacker, it seemed, by everyone, including cleaning ladies and donut sellers. Did he stop? Of course not – moreover, he went all out, attracting the attention not of the county or state police, but directly of the FBI.
But more on that in the next part.
