A Review of Kevin Mitnick's Book Ghost in the Wires

Originally published on: Sun, 21 Aug 2011.

If you've seen the comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you probably laughed at the witch-trial scenes where the ignorant townspeople clamor for the death of a so-called "witch". The governing offical offers up a test; since witches are made of wood, they'll immerse the accused in water. If she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks to the bottom ( and subsequently drowns ) she's not a witch.

One wonders how the ignorance and prejudices of the actual witch-trials that were parodied in the film could have existed. It was a very different time, I suppose. Surely those same ignorances and prejudices do not rear their ugly heads in present-day America.

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I first became aware of the name Kevin Mitnick from the book Cyberpunk : Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier by John Markoff and Katie Holmes. The very first chapter is titled Kevin: the Dark-Side Hacker.

Although I had no reason to simply trust these authors to paint an accurate picture of this Kevin individual, my perception of him based on this book was not positive. He seemed to be an obsessive, amoral, almost sociopathic individual. I didn't think it odd as technophobes tend to have social graces that fall outside the norm. I took the book's depiction as gospel.

In the mid-1990's, I saw the newspaper photograph that seemed to be carried by every major television network at the time, showing a disheveled Kevin Mitnick. This photograph didn't do any disservice to the image that I had already formed of the man.

The story making the news was that a manhunt had begun for "the world's most dangerous hacker". Mitnick was arrested on February 15, 1995.

I had begun to read the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly on a regular basis at about this time. I was finding out that the Mitnick that I had read about in Cyberpunk, might be a very different individual than I had believed.

The magazine became the nexus for the "Free Kevin" movement; the effort to bring awareness of Mitnick's plight to the masses. Over the course of the next several years, I read reports in 2600 about violations of Mitnick's rights and civil liberties.

Mitnick was released from jail on January 21, 2000.

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The book Ghost in the Wires : My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker tells Mitnick's story from his own point-of-view. It is a biography of sorts that leads up to the 1995 arrest and the aftermath.

The early chapters of the book cover his childhood curiosities and his early discovery of his talent for "social-engineering" ... an art of persuading others to do your bidding. Living in a single-parent household with his mother left Mitnick a lot of unsupervised time to try to feed his appetite for certain technical curiosities. He was very interested in learning about the inner-workings of telephone networks.

Over time, Mitnick began to explore these networks by using combinations of computer technology and social-engineering to manipulate the mechanisms in the phone systems to satisfy his curiosities. Often, Mitnick needed places to store the vast amounts of information and source-code that he was procuring on his expeditions, so he circumvented security systems on various networked computers ... usually at colleges or at technical firms ... to store all of this electronic data.

Although Mitnick became a skilled computer programmer, he didn't hold jobs as a professional programmer for very long.

Some of Mitnick's early explorations led to the involvement of the FBI. Mitnick began to get a reputation as an evil "dark-side" hacker. In the events leading up to his 1995 arrest, many ludicrous claims of his hacking abilities had been published in the news media and had been taken as gospel by the non-technical public, including those involved in his incarceration. One of the claims was that he could cause all sorts of havok simply by whistling into a phone. So, he was denied basic telephone access during his trial. He was also denied access to a computer for a while during the trial for fear that even in the days before the presence of wireless networks, Mitnick could somehow use a laptop with no physical network connection to wreak havok on the public.

Prior to the February 15th arrest, Mitnick had gone "on the run" and hid using a few alternate identities. If he'd been able to curb his hacking habit, they might never have found him. His undoing was his legendary skills. When large-scale hacks occurred, Mitnick was blamed even though no one had the tangible evidence at the time to prove that it was him. As he kept flirting with disaster, the authorities and security researcher Tsutomu Shimomura closed in on him and made the arrest.

The terms of Mitnick's release from prison mandated that he not be able to use any kind of computer. This limited his job options, but Mitnick began to conduct paid speaking-engagements and wrote his first book: The Art of Deception I imagine that it was a little rocky in the beginning, but Mitnick is now recognized as a top ( if not THE top ) computer security expert.

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I'd read bits and pieces of events depicted in the book before, but it was nice to read them from Mitnick's point-of-view. I grealy enjoyed the early chapters which helped to understand how his proclivities formed and grew over time.

I was unable to put myself in his shoes ... I've never been driven by curiosity to the point that he had. His hacking activities had impacted a number of his personal relationships and jobs. At certain junctures in the book, I found myself hoping that he'd just take a job as a VAX programmer and would give up spellunking all of these systems even though I knew the eventual outcome.

At the beginning of each chapter is an encoded message. All but a couple seem to be substitution cyphers. The others are blocks of hex codes. After converting these hex codes to binary, the resulting strings of text look like all of the other scrambled text in each chapter.

While I've finished decoding the first one, I haven't tried to solve any of the others except the second.

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I don't condone some of the things Mitnick had done, but I was taken aback by his treatment. I'm glad to see that the specialties which had kind of been the bane of his existence now afford him the opportunity to work in the field that he loves.

Even if you'd picked up on bits and pieces of the Mitnick story before, I believe you'll find that Ghost in the Wires is a very entertaining book.

Unless otherwise noted, all text is Copyright ©2011 by James K. Lawless.

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