In Memory of Kevin Mitnick. Part 4 — The Most Unexpected Motive for the Attack on the Military

In memory of Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers in history, who managed to break into the systems of the FBI, the NSA and leading Silicon Valley companies. In the fourth part of the series, we recall one of the most unexpected episodes of his career – an attack on military structures, which began with, at first glance, a small student prank. We tell how Mitnick and his friend used social engineering, phone phreaking and technical savvy to gain access to the internal code of DEC’s VMS operating system.

How a student joke turned into a hack of military systems

In the previous article, we told you about how Kevin Mitnick’s attempts to become a law-abiding citizen, a corporate IT guy, and even a good man failed. The sins of his youth and the fame of a dangerous hacker literally followed him on the heels – and then detectives joined the pursuers. Well, our hero was not good at coping with stress without revealing something and breaking someone’s network just for fun. Kevin and his best friend Lenny could not resist trolling the agents who were following them, even in conditions of total control – as a result, they were expelled from college. Of course, they did not stop there, which led to very serious consequences.

The main reason for Kevin and Lenny’s expulsion from college was their keen interest in the software of the company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The interest was mutual: while their hacker friends were trying to get the code of their VMS operating system, complete with the developers’ internal data on security systems, DEC agents were following them together with the police and trying to catch them red-handed. It was Kevin and Lenny’s joke about a corporation employee who was secretly monitoring their educational accounts that became the last straw – after the poor guy was literally overwhelmed with paper from the printer, which began to print a report on literally every action of their friends, they were asked to leave college.

Left without education, Kevin and Lenny devoted all their time to getting the coveted code and embarrassing DEC together with the police. Using “social engineering” and phone phishing, they routinely pretended to be calling from a company employee from an internal corporate number — and got logins and passwords with the necessary access from another digital security noob. After that, they quietly changed one of the passwords — which was quite easy to do in those days — and soon they were enthusiastically digging into a directory with the wonderfully inconspicuous name VMS_SOURCE. Oh, the innocent 80s!

Thanks to them, they got into the email of developers, including one of the creators of the VMS operating system, Andy Goldstein, and found there letters from a British programmer-enthusiast Neil Clift from the University of Leeds, who was excellent at finding vulnerabilities in the system and helping Andy fix them. In the correspondence, Kevin and Lenny discovered an analysis of the work of the strict German hacker group Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which had previously managed to tweak the login system of the VMS operating system to make the user invisible – while disabling security settings for him.

Kevin contacted German hackers—who, it turned out, were already aware of his identity—and they were together. Lenny, less known to the police and corporations, managed to get a job again at a company that actively used DEC computers running the VMS operating system, which allowed Mitnick and di Cicco to patch the hacking system literally immediately after each update. When DEC programmers created a search program to detect unauthorized access to the system, it was hacked literally immediately after its release.

Then Kevin and Lenny took up the Easynet computer network, which DEC was building for its computers as an alternative to the developing Internet. From it they planned to download a large amount of operating system source code data—but here everything ran into the problem of a lack of servers to store them. Having come up with nothing better, the friends found nodes that connected Easynet to ARPAnet, which largely remained an American military network in case of nuclear war. And the nodes in question were mostly located at American military facilities. And really, where else could two young talents store stolen data if not on secret military servers?

The first node was found at the US Navy’s Patuxent River Air Base in Maryland, which covers the approaches to the country’s capital, Washington, and the largest naval base in Baltimore from the Atlantic Ocean. Soon, the space on their servers was completely filled with archived data from Kevin and Lenny, disguised as digital garbage. Then they climbed into the servers of the most important national jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.

However, the computer scientists at the California research center were more savvy than at the naval air base. They were able to detect unauthorized file changes, reverse-engineered the binary files, and determined that the code used for the hack was written by German hackers from the Chaos Club. Since some members of the West German hacker community, including one of the founders of the CCC, worked part-time with the KGB of the USSR, the American press made a proud noise in the genre of “German communist hackers are breaking into our secret servers!”.

Fortunately, Kevin and Lenny were not noticed at the time. They hacked into several less advanced military facilities where there were Easynet connection points with ARPAnet, and began downloading gigabytes of source code for the VMS operating system, version 5. Naturally, such a huge amount of traffic caught the attention of DEC’s sysadmins, who spent many sleepless nights trying to stop what was happening by locking accounts and changing passwords. But by this time, Kevin and Lenny had such tight control over their entire system that they literally knew about every move of the “enemy” in real time – and took every measure to download everything they wanted.

And then one fine day, all the source code was downloaded. Now it needed to be transferred to media in the form of magnetic tapes. The process was started with the help of good old social engineering – after which the number of tapes with the VMS source code in the hacker friends’ wallets began to go into the tens. And everything would be fine, but in the process, Kevin and Lenny began to compete in hacking computer networks, each time betting $ 150. It quickly became clear that Kevin always won by one goal. Lenny was more and more annoyed with this each time, but he refused to stop the competition on principle.

After a while, Lenny suggested that Kevin break the electronic lock in the computer room – with a bet of the same $ 150. Kevin banally found the code in his wallet, Lenny was already out of his mind – and when Kevin demanded his one hundred and fifty bucks, he replied that he had no money right now. With approximately the same excuses, he continued to “freeze” his colleague for quite a long time. Then, indignant Kevin could think of nothing better than to call his employer’s company on behalf of the bailiff and announce the court’s decision to block Lenny’s accounts. After which, as you might guess, he went beyond the orbit of Pluto on an aphedronic thrust.

Soon, one night, Lenny invited Kevin to work from his office: he was trying to hack the account of Neil Clift, the same enthusiast programmer who helped DEC improve the protection of the operating system. A few days passed. Lenny called him again – they said that he had finally received the money and could pay. When Kevin arrived at the agreed place in the underground parking lot, he saw that his friend was smiling strangely, and when he did get out of the car, FBI agents flew out from everywhere and put Mitnik on the hood. Within hours, he was taken to a federal prison on an island with the ominous name of Terminal Island. And Lenny didn’t even fulfill Kevin’s last request to call his mother and tell her that he was being held by the FBI.

As it turned out, after the story with the castle, Lenny, who finally left in anger, told his superiors about what had happened, and they informed the DEC and the FBI. That night of the hack, the computers in Lenny’s office were already under the full control of Bureau agents, and Lenny himself had a wiretap on him to collect evidence. From the island prison, Kevin was taken to the FBI headquarters in Los Angeles, and then to court – where he was charged with a whole train of charges.

Among them were:

• hacking into the US National Security Agency system and obtaining classified access codes;

• disconnecting the phone line of a former probation officer;

• producing a judge’s credit report after Kevin didn’t like his attitude;

• spreading a fake story in the media that the Security Pacific National Bank had lost millions of dollars after Kevin was denied a job;

• repeatedly using and disconnecting the phone of actress Christy McNichol;

• hacking into the police department’s computers and deleting information about Kevin’s previous arrests.

As the assistant prosecutor read the list, Kevin’s eyes widened, and the fifth point heated up more and more. He really broke a lot and stole a lot from the data, but on these specific points he was absolutely innocent! At least that’s what Mytnik claimed until the last day of his life. For example, everything he pulled from the NSA was limited to an unclassified list of the agency’s telephone codes, which was publicly available on ARPAnet in a file called NSA.TXT. The fake about the bank was not Kevin at all. And he had no relation to or interest in actress Christy McNichol – and she herself later denied any problems with the phone.

However, all this did not help. American Themis turned out to be extremely unfair to Kevin, and he finally lost faith in her. We will tell you what this led to in the next part.