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Mitnick Helps Bust Bomb Hoaxer
PhrostyMcByte writes "According to The Register/SecurityFocus: 'Ex-hacker Kevin Mitnick is a hero to the small town of River Rouge, Michigan, after using his tech skills to help officials nab the culprit behind a harrowing series of bomb threats.'" According to the piece, Detective Lt. John Keck "began searching the Internet for technical guidance, which led him to Kevin Mitnick, who'd earlier demonstrated a technique for spoofing Caller ID on the specialty cable network TechTV." Mitnick's comment on the bomb hoaxer? "He wasn't really hacking... he was really just being a jerk."
...the hoaxes unnerved some residents of the Detroit suburb, which boasts a population in the high four digits.
"It is kind of funny, I'll admit, but this is not the time for these kinds of games," says Keck.
No, it wasn't kind of funny. It was stupid... Really stupid. It wasted a lot of people's time. The bomb threat is one thing. Diverting police cars, forcing evacuations, searching for false bombs, making someone research how to track telephone calls, and having a writer tell a sensationalized story was a huge waste of time.
This had nothing to do with phone phreaking, hacking, or anything. It was a dumbass kid who made a call from a cell phone and someone doing their job and finding Mitnick (who of course was willing to look like the good-guy) to solve the problem.
For once I don't recommend that you RTFA.
I guess some criminals _can_ be rehabilitated. Nice to see our system isn't _totally_ broken.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
To the media, what's the difference? Anyone who commits a crime involving a computer is considered a hacker to them...
You can make a difference by doing good hackerly things and at the same time denouncing the draconian measures.
All he did was advise the cops to use the same tracking techniques that got him caught. Not exactly brain surgery.
and now have an angry grudge
well I was also not popular in high school, but I got over it.
you dont need to pre-judge like that...
(p.s. your website is dixiechicks.com... just making sure you know that)
Kevin was hacking, but he was also being a jerk. The two are not mutually exclusive.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The dead-end led Keck to suspect that the caller was employing some hi-tech means to cover his tracks. *67?
Hardly, however it is nice to see that he's using what skills he has (which aren't exactly steller) for good rather than just getting himself in trouble.
My hats off to him and I hope he keeps it up.
Wether people like it or not, there will always be someone that will misuse technology and its loopholes.
Isn't it nice that there are some people that KNOW those loopholes and that don't misuse them? How can we defend ourselves against something we don't know?
These kinds of actions bring the focus right to the differences between hacking and cracking most society is led to believe don't exist. Let me add that the good publicity comes in handy :)
I don't think this is an issue of technology as much as it is an issue of teachers needing to pay attention to their damn students.
reminds me of that movie "pay it forward" applied to criminal justice.
Sure, set a jerk to catch a jerk. Jerks who repent often spend their time in attonement.
That doesn't mean we should ignore his having been a jerk, but neither should we hold that against his works of attonement.
KFG
What happened: Officer: I need this TelCo: Searching... Nothing.. Try Again...
instead of what should have happened: Officer: We need to catch this haxor TelCo: Ok, ..., there it is!
More likely explanation, this is a small town, (article says about 4 digit population) and they don't want to send a kid to jail for being stupid. If he does it again though I'm sure that he'll be deported or maybe even defenistratred.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Evidently Kevin learned his lesson - he openly admits to having been a criminal it seems, and besides, what better to catch a criminal than with somebody who really knows how they think?
This sig no verb.
"Armed with Mitnick's advice, Keck went back to SBC and demanded a "terminating number search" for any calls made to the high school's lines on the dates of the bomb threats."
So really all Kevin did was point out how unhelpful SBC is to law enforcement? SBC could help but wasn't asked in the right way. How is our government expected to tackle matters of national security when the major communications companies are unwilling to help unless you say the "magic words."
So it's almost too good to be true to see Mitnick in a scenario where he's the hero who saves the innocent villagers but shows no animosity towards the perpetrator, just a good helping of world-weary contempt for somebody who thinks he's an anti-hero (hacker) but isn't. He also, in the same epic tradition, shows respect for the abilities of the man who brought him down in the first place.
Borrowing a laptop without proper authorisation is a worse crime than rape in School Land.
The more I hear of the insane bureaucratic messups that are happening in schools, the more I realise that kids today who say "There's no use learning nuffing in school cos it don't apply to da real world" aren't being young naive and stupid... but damned insightful.
Leave adulthood for kids to become jaded & cynical dammit, don't make them that at 15!
What did Mitnick do exactly? He told the police what to ask for from the phone company?
I would think if the police went to the phone company and asked them "we need to find out where these calls are coming from", the phone company would know what needs to be done to find out.
I hope everything Mitnick knows is also known by someone at the phone company. It seems the cooperation of the phone company would preclude the necessity of involving an "expert" like Mitnick.
The sad part of this is that the detective couldn't figure out what to ask for, or that SBC refused to cooperate fully. I think it's great that Mitnick gets some positive press and furthers the idea of white hat operations, but the more disturbing thing this story illuminates is how totally inept law enforcement is when it comes to tech issues.
The boy didn't even employ anything creative or hacker-like. He just dialed a number on his phone, and the authorities needed an ex-con hacker to help them with this?
I think stories like this call attention to the fact that there is a *desperate* need for more training of law enforcement people in tech issues.
Maybe thats what you call rehabilitation?
I thought it clear that Keck didn't mean it was humerous. He meant that Keck thought it ironic, almost silly, that classmates and/or his teacher didn't see him or turn him in.
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Agreed, what was done to Mitnick was wrong. But that does not justify the actions of the prank caller. I applaud Mitnick for making that distinction.
First the detective tries this: "When the detective served a search warrant on SBC Ameritech for the source of the calls, the phone company came up dry."
Then after he talks to Mitnick and gives a more specific request: "This time, SBC tracked the calls as far as cell phone carrier Sprint PCS, and identified the specific trunks on which the calls entered the local phone network."
Why does SBC need the help of an ex-hacker to come up with the right terminology to search its own system for evidence of crime? Do phone companies treat law enforcement with the same dull contempt that they do their regular customers?
I can just imagine: "Thank you for calling SBC Ameritech's search warrant compliance department. Please listen carefully to the following options, as they have recently changed. Press 1 if you are tracking an obscene phone caller. Press 2 if you are tracking a bomber. beep Thank you. Please press 1 if the bomber is threatening a commercial address. Press 2 if the bomber is threatening a residential address. beep...."
Kevin may have gained a lot of fame for being so successful, but it's not as if he's the most technically proficient hacker of all time.
I wouldn't run away and hide, or anything like that, I'd just be very paranoid when my bank phones me up and says they need my SS# and CC# because their records have been lost...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And see the /. reaction change tone...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What I find particularly disturbing is why the TelCo people weren't more involved. I mean:
..., there it is!
What happened: Officer: I need this TelCo: Searching... Nothing.. Try Again...
Instead of what should have happened: Officer: We need to catch this haxor TelCo: Ok,
I, on the other hand, am glad that the telephone company is not being randomly helpful, but insisting that the police go through proper channels before handing out call trace information.
Perhaps they could have told him what to ask for. But I prefer that they err on the side of citizen privacy and let the police learn to do their job through their own methods (as this officer did), rather than spending their resources (and raising customer bills) leading every nosy cop through the procedure by hand, thus encouraging its constant use for ever smaller issues and possibly giving them incorrect legal advice in the process.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, Mitnick never caused harm or did anything destructive like this. Bomb threats are MUCH worse than being a jerk.
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
I was born in Texas and I live in Texas.
I take it that you are OK with them spending such a large amount of money for outdoor carpet while they are graduating people that can not read?
Reminds me of the movie, "Catch me if You Can" (based on a true story). I thought it would be a horrible movie because of Leonardo DeCaprio, but his acting was great. Tom Hanks was not slouch either.
Anyways, the basic plot of the movie is that Leo is the world's most infamous check counterfeiter. Eventually he turns over to the "good guys" and joins Tom Hanks at the end of the movie. Today he provides most of the security to checks.
And you guys locked him up for years! Imagine what he could have done for you if his sentence was to contract for the FBI or the NSA!
WURD!!
I'm glad that the phone company wasn't falling over itself to help. Strict procedures in these cases support civil liberties.
So you think you know a situation that you obviously know nothing about, based on this guy not knowing anything about the situation?
I'm so fucking sick of people dismissing rape claims because there are those who cry wolf.
(And here's a fucking novel idea - how about guys treat girls with respect and not as pieces of meat? Or how about girls get taught to respect themselves and not GO to frat parties and get trashed while wearing as little as possible?)
Ugh.
This is completely ridiculous. Do you realize how hard it is for a woman to try to prosecute rape? Even the medical exam they have to go through is horribly degrading, but they have to do it to prove that sex happened.
Maybe, *maybe* one in a hundred cases are falsified. The fact that your fraternity had 62 cases against it means that you are either incredibly unlucky, or you're a bunch of scumbags who got away with rape. I don't know which, but I've got a guess.
Yes, I'm in a fraternity too (Alpha Kappa Lambda) and I enjoy sex. But only consensual sex. Rape is a horrible thing that scars the victim for the rest of their life. I'm pretty sure that when your fraternity brothers had sex with those women, they didn't care that they were ruining their lives, either.
I didn't think he was dismissing the claims. I think he was warning people not to jump on a bandwagon of blaming them as if they were guilty without knowing what was really going on.
Being accused of a sex crime carries with it a stigma that can last for quite some time after being found innocent. If they did it, fine, nail them in court for it and send them to prison. When it's a situation where some idiot dresses like a streetwalker, gets drunk in an environment where things like this are more likely to happen, then wish they didn't do it after the fact...I don't think *ALL* the blame lay in the "victim".
*I'M* sick of hearing people put all the blame on everyone else for what happens to them...they should take some responsibility for the role they played in events as well. It's not bloody rocket science here folks...play in the road long enough, you're going to get hit by a car...
I don't know about more trouble. Mitnick was in prison for five years and spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement. According to the article this kid isn't even facing any jail time but he will likely be expelled from school.
I had personal knowledge of most of these, and they were always consensual (albeit drunken) sex that turned into rape the next morning.
IAmNotALawyer. From what I recall of the general nature of rape laws, the key is the ability for both participants to be able to give informed consent. Thus, statutory rape is illegal based on the idea that below a certain age, the person lacks the legal capacity to make the informed decision. In the case of intoxication (be it ethanol or flunitrazepam), the person is considered legally impaired and unable to give consent. In the state where I went to college, that was codified in the date-rape law.
Of course, there was one stupid part to the law. In theory, if both the guy and girl had drinks before they met, they met up and went off to a bedroom, then when they woke up the next morning ("Aiiigh! Coyote woman/guy!") they could BOTH file rape charges under the law as written. For some reason, it really pissed people off when I pointed this out. (It made a fun test to distinguish feminists versus feminazis; the former looked thoughtful, the latter started screaming at me.)
Speaking from a personal ethical standpoint, I would say that if you knowingly choose to take a drug (like ethanol), you are morally responsible for anything you choose to do while your judgement is impaired by it. So, if the girl goes out and gets drunk, and decides to screw a guy, she should be considered responsible... in that she freely choose to enter the state of impaired judgement. This, however, is not how the law reads. Choosing to have sex is the ONLY thing you can get out from legal responsibility for when you choose to become intoxicated... which is stupid.
So (at least where I went to college), if she knew there was grain in the punch, it was legally rape, even if morally it wasn't. On the other hand, if you don't check that she knows the punch is spiked when you hand her that first glass, it may be rape on ALL accounts.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Cue Websters:
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Main Entry: 1funny
Pronunciation: 'f&-nE
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): funnier; -est
1 a : affording light mirth and laughter : AMUSING b : seeking or intended to amuse : FACETIOUS
2 : differing from the ordinary in a suspicious, perplexing, quaint, or eccentric way : PECULIAR -- often used as a sentence modifier (funny, things didn't turn out the way we planned)
3 : involving trickery or deception (told his prisoner not to try anything funny)
------
It was funny.
Or how about girls get taught to respect themselves and not GO to frat parties and get trashed while wearing as little as possible
Speaking as a guy, girls should be able to wear as little as they want to the frat party, and still beat the guys off with nothing more than saying "no": how they dress is NO excuse for a guy acting as anything other than a gentleman. (Remember, even if she's wandering around naked, you have to ask politely "Do you mind if I grope your tits?" before trying it.)
On the other hand, if they choose to drink or do drugs, they should do so willing to accept responsibility for anything they do while under the influence, whether it's spraypainting their name on a wall, driving their car into a wall, or screwing some random stranger.
How about guys treat girls with respect and not as pieces of meat?
Assholes get attention; they may be slapped more often, but if they don't have a specific target for their pickup attempts, they have good chance of getting laid, too.
Nice guys don't get slapped, but they not only don't get laid, they also don't get much in the way of moderate freindly attention from either specific or general targets as encouragement either-- they mostly get ignored.
Ergo, agressive behavior by guys is more socially rewarding in the near term, and civilized behavior is extensively under-rewarded.
Behavior that is rewarded is more often repeated; behavior that is unrewarded is less often repeated. Do the math, and you get both the "nice guys finish last" and the "guys treat girls like pieces of meat" conditions. The corollaries of how this can be changed are left as an exercise for the student.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Credit card abuse costs banks money, and people trouble. Bombs kill.
Where's you get this figure? Thin air?
'Even by these strict standards, slightly more than 1/4 were judged to be false.'
25% is a LOT higher than "Maybe, *maybe* one in a hundred".
It depends on the state. Laws vary, as do interpretations of those laws. But I believe that most sensible law enformenct officials and sexual assualt counselors, at least the ones I've talked to, point to the initiating partner as the one at fault. So, yes, if the woman initiated it, she might be the rapist. Other people say that the drunker one is the victim. Everyone, though, knows that the law is there to protect people, not to get them in trouble. But the vast majority of rapists are men, a fact we as guys have to accept.
Think about you comment, too. Where's the outrage for the rapes that happened in the frat? I'm positive (and I'm at college, too) that out of 62 allegations, even with the most generous leeway for your brothers, at least a few were actual rapes. Why no concern for those women who's lives were shattered? Your attitude is exactly why so many women are afraid to come forward after being sexually assaulted.
No one ever said that being a jerk couldn't be profitable.
KFG
According to his book, much of Kevin's skills lie in Social Engineering, a.k.a. convincing people to tell you exactly what your looking for. He makes a bit point of saying that it's much easier to convince people to tell you their password than to crack into their computer.
Astroturf does not build character. More expensive equipment does not make you better players. Case in point: When I was in highschool, our track team was the best in the county even though we had the worst track (it was cinder, everyone else had rubberized). Since they've gotten the new track facility, they haven't done as well.
I fail to see the harm in having folks who aren't as educated as you and I, if that's what they've chosen for themselves.
These kids didn't choose it. A bunch of adults told them that it wasn't important to know how to read, but it is important to have astroturf.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.