Ghost in the Wires

Born on August 6, 1963, Kevin Mitnick was an only child raised primarily by his mother, Shelly Mitnick. They lived an itinerant life in Southern California, as Shelly looked for work and entangled herself in a string of bad relationships.

The constant movement meant Kevin didn’t get much of a chance to make friends. Plus, his mother’s boyfriends had a bad habit of being abusive to Kevin, which probably contributed to the development of his anti-authority attitude.

Kevin managed to get decent grades in school, and he excelled in sports, but his imagination was captured by an extracurricular activity: magic.

When Kevin was ten years old, a neighbor showed him a magic trick. It was love at first sight. Kevin loved the element of deception and became obsessed with practicing tricks and discovering ways of manipulating the audience, all of which would influence his later escapades.

When he was 13, Kevin could often be found at the Survival Bookstore, perusing the pages of The Big Brother Game, a step-by-step guide on how to gain access to people’s property records, their driving history and even their bank account details.

These were techniques that would continue to come in handy as Kevin got further into the world of social engineering.

As the young Mitnick would come to learn, social engineering is the subtle art of manipulating people so that they do what you want. And the first key is to establish trust.

Say you want to call a company and acquire some specific information. You’ll sound more trustworthy if you use the correct terminology and lingo – the words and phrases used by everyone else at the company.

Using this technique, Mitnick was able to pick up a phone and, by saying the right things, get records and personal information on friends, teachers, and even some people he’d never met. It might sound unlikely, but it worked more often than not.

And this was all before his seventeenth birthday!