Chapter 1
Kevin's Story
by Kevin Mitnick

Becoming a Social Engineer

Some people get out of bed each morning dreading their daily work routine at the proverbial salt mines. I've been lucky enough to enjoy my work. In particular you can't imagine the challenge, reward, and pleasure I had in the time I spent as a private investigator. I was honing my talents in the performance art called social engineering-getting people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do for a stranger-and being paid for it.

For me it wasn't difficult becoming proficient in social engineering. My father's side of the family had been in the sales field for generations, so the art of influence and persuasion might have been an inherited trait. When you combine an inclination for deceiving people with the talents of influence and persuasion you arrive at the profile of a social engineer.

You might say there are two specialties within the job classification of con artist. Somebody who swindles and cheats people out of their money belongs to one sub-specialty, the grifter. Somebody who uses deception, influence, and persuasion against businesses, usually targeting their information, belongs to the other sub-specialty, the social engineer. From the time of my bus- transfer trick, when I was too young to know there was anything wrong with what I was doing, I had begun to recognize a talent for finding out the secrets I wasn't supposed to have. I built on that talent by using deception, knowing the lingo, and developing a well-honed skill of manipulation. One way I used to work on developing the skills in my craft (if I may call it a craft) was to pick out some piece of information I didn't really care about and see if I could talk somebody on the other end of the phone into providing it, just to improve my talents. In the same way I used to practice my magic tricks, I practiced pretexting. Through these rehearsals, I soon found I could acquire virtually any information I targeted.

In Congressional testimony before Senators Lieberman and Thompson years later, I told them, "I have gained unauthorized access to computer systems at some of the largest corporations on the planet, and have successfully penetrated some of the most resilient computer systems ever developed. I have used both technical and non-technical means to obtain the source code to various operating systems and telecommunications devices to study their vulnerabilities and their inner workings." All of this was really to satisfy my own curiosity, see what I could do, and find out secret information about operating systems, cell phones, and anything else that stirred my curiosity. The train of events that would change my life started when I became the subject of a July 4th, 1994 front-page, above-the-fold story in the New York Times. Overnight, that one story turned my image from a littleknown nuisance of a hacker into Public Enemy Number One of cyberspace.

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