Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

vault.fbi.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–99 of 99 posts

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#91

Post by cgriswald »

gmueckl wrote: post #52
rglover wrote: post #16

It should be illegal for the government to keep redactions in anything made public/declassified. It's a slap in the face to see entire sections of text (that most certainly contain important context) blocked out with a white blob.

There may be a middle ground where, with some effort effort, a watered down summary of the redacted information could be given (e.g. if a name of a person is redacted, replace it with some sort of unique handle). As long as this is done as an annotations for the visibly marked redaction, I see no problem. The reader may choose to trust those annotations or not.

Plain redactions require the same amount of trust in the redacter but are less likely to leak information.

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#92

Post by 486sx33 »

I think a lot of this was social engineering, but at one time the fbi considered mitnik some kind of super hacker. How did that disconnect happen? I imagine because his targets didn’t want to admit to the fbi how crappy their security was, so they would just say omg! We got hacked!

Big moments I remember from his book.

1. Gaining access to a telco C/O and social engineering his way out after being caught

2. Ultimately being caught by sloppy practices himself, logging into systems he was comfortable with and getting traced, and then forgetting some sort of identification in a ski jacket he hadn’t used in a long time, which was in his closet in a place he was living under a new identity.

It’s been awhile so I could be partly off on those details. But I’d say at least those pieces are very believable.

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#93

Post by quesera »

indrora wrote: post #39
daghamm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've far more respect for Tsutomu. In the end he turned out to be the better hacker. Reading Mitnicks book I sometimes get the impression that the he is making up half of it.

Anyone who has studied the later parts of the phone system know that at least a few of his stories are actually bullshit. It wouldn't be until much later (in the 90s at least, while he was in prison) that the advent of pure digital switching would enable the random reassignment of phone lines like he describes in the story about turning his friend's home phone into a payphone. The lines were separated and had differe…

Medium-sized US exchanges were being converted to ESS in the 1980s.

I remember the day my busy signal changed from a buzz (350+440 Hz) to a tone (480+620 Hz).

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#95

Post by SJC_Hacker »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #50

1981? Security mostly was knowing which phone number to dial in, according to a deceased friend of mine.

I guess thats why Matthew Broderick's character had a script which dialed random numbers in a target area code (I think he used Sunnyvale, CA in the movie)

I wonder if anyone did that back in the day. Not sure how much the telco would have appreciated it ...

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#96

Post by CodeWriter23 »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #95
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #50

1981? Security mostly was knowing which phone number to dial in, according to a deceased friend of mine.

I guess thats why Matthew Broderick's character had a script which dialed random numbers in a target area code (I think he used Sunnyvale, CA in the movie) I wonder if anyone did that back in the day. Not sure how much the telco would have appreciated it ...

Never used an auto-dialer myself, but it would be trivial to code one. Just send ATDT out the serial port and see if "CONNECT" comes back before timing out.

Back in that time, I think a good rate was $0.01/minute for a local call on a consumer landline. Unlimited calling plans came later. Not attributing any intent to the telco, just saying, there would be no cost issue to motivate an investigation.

Re: Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

#97

Post by SJC_Hacker »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #96
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess thats why Matthew Broderick's character had a script which dialed random numbers in a target area code (I think he used Sunnyvale, CA in the movie) I wonder if anyone did that back in the day. Not sure how much the telco would have appreciated it ...

Never used an auto-dialer myself, but it would be trivial to code one. Just send ATDT out the serial port and see if "CONNECT" comes back before timing out. Back in that time, I think a good rate was $0.01/minute for a local call on a consumer landline. Unlimited calling plans came later. Not attributing any intent to the telco, just saying, there would be no cost issue to motivate an investigation.

It definitely wasn't local - he was in Washington but dialed into Sunnyvale, CA.

I can't remember charges for local exchanges (same area code), but I only remember as far back as the late 80s. It was something like 10 cents a minute. I remember all the adds about "friends and family" special rates/etc. Metering on voice calls persisted into the 2000s.

But the calls were very brief (if they did pick up) unless he got a "hit". So thousands of calls could have no charge

Or maybe he spliced into his neighbors line :-)

Post reply on HN