Tsutomu
Shimomura  Tsutomu Shimomura
is a senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center,
where he works on problems in areas as diverse as
computational physics and computer security. He came to the
University of California at San Diego in 1989 to join the
physics department as a research scientist.
He has studied physics with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman
at the California Institute of Technology and has worked as a
research associate with physicist Steven Wolfram. In the
summer of 1984 he worked at Thinking Machines Corporation,
helping the Cambridge, Mass.-based massively parallel computer
start-up company design a disk system to support the rapid
movement of vast databases.
In the fall of 1984 he became a staff physicist at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, where he was one of the architects
of an advanced parallel computer. He also worked in the
Laboratory's theoretical division with Brosl Hasslacher, one
of the nation's leading researchers in computational physics.
Shimomura assisted Hasslacher in developing a radical approach
to simulating the flow of fluids based on a new model of
computation, known as lattice gas automata. It takes advantage
of natural parallelism and dramatically speeds computing on a
variety of problems.
In recent years Shimomura has also worked in the area of
computer security research. He has consulted with a number of
government agencies on security and computer crime issues. In
1992 he testified before a Congressional Committee chaired by
Representative Edward Markey on issues surrounding the lack of
privacy and security in cellular telephones. In February 1995
he helped several online service and Internet companies track
down computer outlaw Kevin Mitnick, who had stolen software
and electronic mail from Shimomura's computers. He is the
author of Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's
Most Wanted Computer Outlaw -- By The Man Who Did It, with
John Markoff< (Hyperion, January 1996).
A Japanese citizen, Shimomura was raised in Princeton, New
Jersey. He lives in the San Diego area where he is an active
inline skater. He is also an avid cross country skier.
Kevin
Mitnick An excerpt from Takedown.
 Who is Kevin Mitnick? The picture that emerged
after his arrest in Raleigh, N.C. last February was of a
31-year old computer programmer, who had been given a number
of chances to get his life together but each time was seduced
back to the dark side of the computer world. Kevin David
Mitnick reached adolescence in suburban Los Angeles in the
late 1970s, the same time the personal computer industry was
exploding beyond its hobbyist roots. His parents were
divorced, and in a lower-middle-class environment that lacked
adventure and in which he was largely a loner and an
underachiever, he was seduced by the power he could gain over
the telephone network. The underground culture of phone
phreaks had already flourished for more than a decade, but it
was now in the middle of a transition from the analog to the
digital world. Using a personal computer and modem it became
possible to commandeer a phone company's digital central
office switch by dialing in remotely, and Kevin became adept
at doing so. Mastery of a local telephone company switch
offered more than just free calls: It opened a window into the
lives of other people to eavesdrop on the rich and powerful,
or on his own enemies.
Mitnick soon fell in with an informal phone phreak gang
that met irregularly in a pizza parlor in Hollywood Much of
what they did fell into the category of pranks, like taking
over directory assistance and answering operator calls by
saying, "Yes, that number is eight-seven-five-zero and a half.
Do you know how to dial the half, ma'am?" or changing the
class of service on someone's home phone to payphone status,
so that whenever they picked up the receiver a recorded voice
asked them to deposit twenty cents. But the group seemed to
have a mean streak as well. One of its members destroyed files
of a San Francisco -based computer time-sharing company, a
crime that went unsolved for more than a year -- until a
break-in at a Los Angeles telephone company switching center
led police to the gang.
The case was actually solved
when a jilted girlfriend of one of the gang went to the
police... That break-in occurred over
Memorial Day weekend in 1981, when Kevin and two friends
decided to physically enter Pacific Bell's COSMOS phone center
in downtown Los Angeles. COSMOS, or Computer System for
Mainframe Operations, was a database used by many of the
nation's phone companies for controlling the phone system's
basic recordkeeping functions. The group talked their way past
a security guard and ultimately found the room where the
COSMOS system was located. Once inside they took lists of
computer passwords, including the combinations to the door
locks at nine Pacific Bell central offices and a series of
operating manuals for the COSMOS system.. To facilitate later
social engineering they planted their pseudonyms and phone
numbers in a rolodex sitting on one of the desks in the room.
With a flourish one of the fake names they used was "John
Draper," who was an actual computer programmer also known as
the legendary phone phreak, Captain Crunch, the phone numbers
were actually misrouted numbers that would ring at a coffee
shop pay phone in Van Nuys.
The crime was far from perfect, however. A telephone
company manager soon discovered the phony numbers and reported
them to the local police, who started an investigation. The
case was actually solved when a jilted girlfriend of one of
the gang went to the police, and Kevin and his friends were
soon arrested. The group was charged with destroying data over
a computer network and with stealing operator's manuals from
the telephone company. Kevin, 17 years old at the time, was
relatively lucky, and was sentenced to spend only three months
in the Los Angeles Juvenile Detention Center, followed by a
year's probation.
A run-in with the police might have persuaded most bright
kids to explore the many legal ways to have computer
adventures, but Mitnick appeared to be obsessed by some
twisted vision. Rather than developing his computer skills in
creative and productive ways, he seemed interested only in
learning enough short-cuts for computer break-ins and dirty
tricks to continue to play out a fantasy that led to collision
after collision with the police throughout the 1980s. He
obviously loved the attention and the mystique his growing
notoriety was bringing. Early on, after seeing the 1975 Robert
Redford movieThree Days of the Condor, he had adopted
Condor as his nom de guerre. In the film Redford plays
the role of a hunted CIA researcher who uses his experience as
an Army signal corpsman to manipulate the phone system and
avoid capture. Mitnick seemed to view himself as the same kind
of daring man on the run from the law.
After he was released, he
obtained the license plate "X HACKER" for his
Nissan... His next arrest was in 1983
by campus police at the University of Southern California,
where he had gotten into minor trouble a few years earlier,
when he was caught using a university computer to gain illegal
access to the ARPAnet. This time he was discovered sitting at
a computer in a campus terminal room, breaking into a Pentagon
computer over the ARPAnet, and was sentenced to six months at
the California Youth Authority's Karl Holton Training School,
a juvenile prison in Stockton, California. After he was
released, he obtained the license plate "X HACKER" for his
Nissan but he was still very much in the computer break-in
business. Several years later he went underground for more
than a year after being accused of tampering with a TRW credit
reference computer; an arrest warrant was issued, but it later
vanished from police records without explanation.
By 1987, Mitnick seemed to be making an effort to pull his
life together, and he began living with a woman who was taking
a computer class with him at a local vocational school. After
a while, however, his obsession drew him back, and this time
his use of illegal telephone credit card numbers led police
investigators to the apartment he was sharing with his
girlfriend in Thousand Oaks, California. He was convicted of
stealing software from the Santa Cruz Operation, a California
software company, and in December 1987, he was sentenced to 36
months probation. That brush with the police, and the
resultant wrist slap, seemed only increase his sense of
omnipotence.
In 1987 and 1988, Kevin and a friend, Lenny DiCicco, fought
a pitched electronic battle against scientists at Digital
Equipment's Palo Alto research laboratory. Mitnick had become
obsessed with obtaining a copy of >Digital's VMS
minicomputer operating system, and was trying to do so by
gaining entry to the company's corporate computer network,
known as Easynet. The computers at Digital's Palo Alto
laboratory looked easiest, so every night with remarkable
persistence Mitnick and DiCicco would launch their modem
attacks from a small Calabasas, California company where
DiCicco had a computer support job. Although Reid discovered
the attacks almost immediately, he didn't know where they were
coming from, nor did the local police or FBI, because Mitnick
was manipulating the telephone network's switches to disguise
the source of the modem calls.
...he agreed to one year in
prison and six months in a counseling program for his
computer "addiction." The FBI can
easily serve warrants and get trap-and-trace information from
telephone companies, but few of its agents know how to
interpret the data they provide. If the bad guy is actually
holed up at the address that corresponds to the telephone
number, they're set. But if the criminal has electronically
broken into to the telephone company's local switch and
scrambled the routing tables, they're clueless. Kevin had
easily frustrated their best attempts at tracking him through
the telephone network using wiretaps and traces. He would
routinely use two computer terminals each night -- one for his
forays into Digital's computers, the other as a lookout that
scanned the telephone company computers to see if his trackers
were getting close. At one point, a team of law enforcement
and telephone security agents thought they had tracked him
down, only to find that Mitnick had diverted the telephone
lines so as to lead his pursuers not to his hideout in
Calabasas, but to an apartment in Malibu. Mitnick, it seemed,
was a tough accomplice, for even as they had been working
together he had been harassing DiCicco by making fake calls to
DiCicco's employer, claiming to be a Government agent and
saying that DiCicco was in trouble with the Internal Revenue
Service. The frustrated DiCicco confessed to his boss, who
notified DEC and the FBI, and Mitnick soon wound up in federal
court in Los Angeles. Although DEC claimed that he had stolen
software worth several million dollars, and had cost DEC
almost $200,000 in time spent trying to keep him out of their
computers, Kevin pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud
and one count of possessing illegal long-distance access
codes.
It was the fifth time that Mitnick had been apprehended for
a computer crime, and the case attracted nationwide attention
because, in an unusual plea bargain, he agreed to one year in
prison and six months in a counseling program for his computer
"addiction." It was a strange defense tactic, but a federal
judge, after initially balking, bought the idea that there was
some sort of psychological parallel between the obsession
Mitnick had for breaking in to computer systems and an
addict's craving for drugs. After he finished his jail time
and his halfway-house counseling sentence for the 1989 Digital
Equipment conviction Mitnick moved to Las Vegas and took a
low-level computer programming position for a mailing list
company. His mother had moved there, as had a woman who called
herself Susan Thunder who had been part of Mitnick's phone
phreak gang in the early 1980s, and with whom he now became
reacquainted. It was during this period that he tried to
"social engineer" me over the phone. In early 1992 Mitnick
moved back to the San Fernando Valley area after his
half-brother died of an apparent heroin overdose. He briefly
worked for his father in construction, but then took a job he
found through a friend of his father's at the Tel Tec
Detective Agency . Soon after he began, someone was discovered
illegally using a commercial database system on the agency's
behalf, and Kevin was once again the subject of an FBI
investigation. In September the Bureau searched his apartment,
as well as the home and workplace of another member of the
original phone phreak gang. Two months later a federal judge
issued a warrant for Mitnick's arrest for having violated the
terms of his 1989 probation. There were two charges: illegally
accessing a phone company computer, and associating with one
of the people with whom he'd originally been arrested in 1981.
His friends claimed Mitnick had been set up by the detective
firm; whatever the truth, when the FBI came to arrest him,
Kevin Mitnick had vanished.
His escape, subsequently
reported in the Southern California newspapers, made the
authorities look like bumblers who were no match for a
brilliant and elusive cyberthief. In
late 1992 someone called the California Department of Motor
Vehicles office in Sacramento, and using a valid law
enforcement requester code, attempted to have driver's license
photographs of a police informer faxed to a number in Studio
City, near Los Angeles. Smelling fraud, D.M.V. security
officers checked the number and discovered that it was
assigned to a Kinko's copy shop, which they staked out before
faxing the photographs. But somehow the spotters didn't see
their quarry until he was going out the door of the copy shop.
They started after him, but he outran them across the parking
lot and disappeared around the corner, dropping the documents
as he fled. The agents later determined that they were covered
with Kevin Mitnick's fingerprints. His escape, subsequently
reported in the Southern California newspapers, made the
authorities look like bumblers who were no match for a
brilliant and elusive cyberthief.
John
Markoff John Markoff joined The New York Times in March
of 1988 as a reporter for the paper's business section. He now
writes for the Times from San Francisco where he covers
Silicon Valley, computers and technology issues. At the Times
he broke the story identifying Robert Tappan Morris as the
author of the 1988 Internet worm that crashed thousands of
computers. He writes frequently on technology policy issues
and he also broke the story of the Clinton Administration's
plan to introduce "Clipper"chip surveillance system.
He came to the Times from the San Francisco Examiner where
he worked for three and a half years. He has written about the
field of technology since 1977. From 1984 to 1985 he was West
Coast editor for Byte Magazine and from 1981 to 1983 he was a
reporter and an editor at Infoworld.From 1983 to 1985 he wrote
a column on personal computers for the San Jose Mercury.
In 1988 he received the Software Publishers Association's
award for best news reporting.
Born in Oakland,California on October 24, 1949, Mr. Markoff
grew up in Palo Alto, California and graduated from Whitman
College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1971. He attended
graduate school at the University of Oregon where he received
a masters degree in 1976.
Mr. Markoff is the co-author with Lennie Siegel of The
High Cost of High Tech, published in 1985 by Harper &
Row. More recently he coauthored Cyberpunk:Outlaws and
Hackers on the Computer Frontier (Simon &
Schuster,1991) with Katie Hafner.
He is married and lives in San Francisco.
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The biographies of Tsutomu Shimomura, John Markoff,
and Kevin Mitnick