August 14, 2026 • 10 mins
We’ve all dealt with scammers or hackers when it comes to our business or personal info. It can be mildly irritating . .or horrifying depending on what they get. One of the earliest and best hackers was Kevin Mitnick. But his life did an astounding 180 after he was finally caught and convicted.
Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover . . on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Have you ever had to deal with somebody hacking into
your bank or credit card info, or your phone, or
your socials or maybe your business has been impacted by
an even bigger scam. We've all been through it. Most
of the time. These folks are professionals at what they do.
They're hard to catch, and they often make a bundle
off of us. I'm Patty Steele, one of the biggest
(00:21):
early hackers, was eventually caught, but his game was never
about money, and you're not going to believe what he
did after getting out of prison. That's next on the backstory.
We're back with the backstory. As long as computers have
been a part of our personal and professional lives, there
(00:43):
have been criminals targeting all of us digitally. Let's go
back over thirty years. A thirty two year old guy
named Kevin Mitnick is the most wanted computer criminal in
the United States. He's hunched over a laptop in an
apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a cell phone cloned
to somebody else's number sitting next to him. By this time,
(01:04):
Kevin's face has been on the front page of the
New York Times. The FEDS would later claim he's so dangerous.
He can launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a pay phone. Okay,
how did he get started in those early days of
the internet. Well, his criminal career started even earlier, and
it didn't involve computers. Kevin had a mom who was single,
(01:26):
who worked as a waitress in the San Fernando Valley
north of LA They had no money, and he was
a brilliant but bored kid. At twelve years old, Kevin
loved riding city buses, but bus fares cost money, which
he didn't have too much of, so he studied the system.
He noticed drivers used a specific kind of hole punch
(01:46):
to validate transfer slips. He sweet talked a driver into
telling him where to buy that exact punch, saying it
was for a school project, of course. It was then
he found books of blank transfer slips in a humpster
behind the bus depot, and so, at twelve years old,
he was riding anywhere he wanted in Los Angeles for free.
(02:08):
He knew what he wanted and what he needed to
do to get it, but most importantly, he knew how
to sweet talk somebody into giving him the info he needed.
Kevin Mitnick had discovered the one thing he would spend
the rest of his life exploiting not software, not hardware. People.
He'd later call it social engineering, hacking the human operating system,
(02:31):
and he was, according to the experts, the best who
ever did it. In high school, he learned how to
manipulate Pacific Bell's phone systems and was able to reroute calls,
eavesdrop on lines, change a friend's home phone to a
payphone that demanded a dime every time the family picked
it up. It was all about the fun of the prank.
He compared it to magic tricks, but it escalated. By
(02:55):
the early eighties, Kevin had graduated from phones to computers.
This was his thing, his path break in, get caught,
promise to stop break in again. In nineteen eighty one,
he and some friends just walked into Pacific Bell's Cosmos
facility and walked out with passwords and system manuals. He
(03:15):
got probation. In nineteen eighty three, he was caught breaking
into Pentagon ad Jason systems from a university terminal. Juvenile
detention was what he got. By nineteen eighty eight, he
had hacked into Digital Equipment Corporation and copied the source
code for their VMS operating system, one of the most
(03:35):
important pieces of software in the world at that time.
That got him a year in federal prison and a
lot of press because at his bail hearing, a federal
prosecutor told the judge that Kevin Mitnick was so dangerous
he could quote whistle into a telephone and launch a
nuclear missile from Norad just one thing. This was not
(03:56):
a thing he couldn't have done. That never was a thing,
But the judge bought it, and Kevin spent eight months
of his sentence in solitary confinement, not because of anything
he did, but because of what officials imagined he might
be able to do with the phone. Problem is, prison
didn't cure the compulsion for him. It was never about
(04:17):
making money. It was simply the thrill of the hack.
He literally collected source codes like somebody else might collect
baseball cards. Even the psychologist who evaluated him compared it
to a gambling addiction. Then, in nineteen ninety two, while
on supervised release, the FBI came knocking with a warrant
(04:37):
and Kevin vanished for almost three years. Using new names
and fake birth certificates. He took jobs at a law
firm in Denver and in Seattle in a hospital it department.
He ran marathons under an alias. He just moved on
when the heat turned up. Of course, he kept hacking
all that time, Motorola, Nokia Son micro Systems. He talked
(05:01):
to Motorola employee into literally sending him the source code
for their flagship cell phone over the phone, using nothing
but charm and a believable story. He was untouchable right
up until Christmas Day nineteen ninety four, when he hacked
the wrong guy's computer. Sou Toomo Shimomorro was a computational
(05:23):
physicist and security expert in San Diego, and he took
the hack personally. Shima Moorro made it his mission to
find the hacker. It became one of the great man
hunts of the early digital age. It was nineteen ninety five,
No Google, no GPS in your pocket. Shimomura and the
FBI traced the intrusions through phone switches and cellular networks
(05:46):
city by city until the trail pointed to Raleigh, North Carolina.
Then they wrote around in the dark with a cellular
frequency direction finding antenna. Huh well, they watched a signal
grow stronger, blocked by block until it led to Kevin's apartment.
At one thirty in the morning on February fifteenth, nineteen
(06:07):
ninety five, the FBI knocked on his door. His run
was over. He spent four and a half years in
pre trial detention without a trial, denied bail, denied for
a stretch, even access to a laptop to review the
evidence against him. He's too dangerous, they said. Then suddenly
the hacker community went nuts. They picketed courthouses, Free Kevin.
(06:31):
Bumper stickers appeared, websites were defaced with his name. He
became a symbol of a government that punished what it
didn't understand. Eventually, he pled guilty with time served. He
walked out of prison on January twenty first, two thousand,
but for three years he was barred from touching a computer,
a cell phone, or anything with a processor in it.
(06:54):
He was even briefly forbidden from being near a fax machine.
The most famous hacker on earth exiled from the digital
world that was his life. Now here's what's amazing. It
turns out the first half of Kevin Mitnick's life had
perfectly prepared him for the second half of his life.
He was now the world's most credible authority on how
(07:16):
systems get broken. He founded Mitnick's security consulting Fortune. Five
hundred companies and governments paid him to break into their
networks with their permission this time, and his team's success
rate on penetration tests was famously close to perfect. He
became chief hacking officer and part owner of No Before,
(07:39):
a security awareness company built around the very lesson he'd
learned on those LA buses human beings are always the
weakest link. He rote best sellers The Art of Deception,
The Art of Intrusion, and his memoir Ghost in the Wires,
which hit the New York Times bestseller list. He testified
before the US Senate. He packed auditoriums doing live hacking demonstrations,
(08:04):
and his business card it was a fully functional stainless
steel lock pick kit. He was a showman. Kevin Mitnick
died July sixteenth, twenty twenty three, at just fifty nine
after a battle with pancreatic cancer, survived by his wife, Kimberly,
who was expecting their first child. She continues in the
(08:24):
cybersecurity business. After his death. Tributes came from FBI agents
and hackers alike, which tells you everything about the arc
of his life, because in the end, Kevin Mitnick's story
was never really about computers. It was about a lonely
kid who discovered that every lock door has a human
being next to it holding the key, and that if
(08:47):
you ask just right, they'll hand it to you with
a smile. These days, the systems have changed, but the
trick hasn't. Somewhere right now, somebody's phone is ringing and
a friend lee voice is asking what sounds like an
innocent question. We've all been there, so think before you answer.
(09:08):
I hope you're enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Please
leave a review and follow or subscribe for free to
get new episodes delivered automatically, and feel free to DM
me if you have a story you'd like me to cover.
On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
(09:29):
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
Premiere Networks, the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions.
Our producer is Mike Pieseglia. Our writer is Jake Kushner.
New episodes are out every Tuesday and Friday, and feel
free to reach out to me with comments and story
suggestions on Instagram at Reel Patty Steele and on Facebook
(09:50):
at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with
Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't know, you
needed to know, but don't you tell
Have you ever had to deal with somebody hacking into
your bank or credit card info, or your phone, or
your socials or maybe your business has been impacted by
an even bigger scam. We've all been through it. Most
of the time. These folks are professionals at what they do.
They're hard to catch, and they often make a bundle
off of us. I'm Patty Steele, one of the biggest
(00:21):
early hackers, was eventually caught, but his game was never
about money, and you're not going to believe what he
did after getting out of prison. That's next on the backstory.
We're back with the backstory. As long as computers have
been a part of our personal and professional lives, there
(00:43):
have been criminals targeting all of us digitally. Let's go
back over thirty years. A thirty two year old guy
named Kevin Mitnick is the most wanted computer criminal in
the United States. He's hunched over a laptop in an
apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a cell phone cloned
to somebody else's number sitting next to him. By this time,
(01:04):
Kevin's face has been on the front page of the
New York Times. The FEDS would later claim he's so dangerous.
He can launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a pay phone. Okay,
how did he get started in those early days of
the internet. Well, his criminal career started even earlier, and
it didn't involve computers. Kevin had a mom who was single,
(01:26):
who worked as a waitress in the San Fernando Valley
north of LA They had no money, and he was
a brilliant but bored kid. At twelve years old, Kevin
loved riding city buses, but bus fares cost money, which
he didn't have too much of, so he studied the system.
He noticed drivers used a specific kind of hole punch
(01:46):
to validate transfer slips. He sweet talked a driver into
telling him where to buy that exact punch, saying it
was for a school project, of course. It was then
he found books of blank transfer slips in a humpster
behind the bus depot, and so, at twelve years old,
he was riding anywhere he wanted in Los Angeles for free.
(02:08):
He knew what he wanted and what he needed to
do to get it, but most importantly, he knew how
to sweet talk somebody into giving him the info he needed.
Kevin Mitnick had discovered the one thing he would spend
the rest of his life exploiting not software, not hardware. People.
He'd later call it social engineering, hacking the human operating system,
(02:31):
and he was, according to the experts, the best who
ever did it. In high school, he learned how to
manipulate Pacific Bell's phone systems and was able to reroute calls,
eavesdrop on lines, change a friend's home phone to a
payphone that demanded a dime every time the family picked
it up. It was all about the fun of the prank.
He compared it to magic tricks, but it escalated. By
(02:55):
the early eighties, Kevin had graduated from phones to computers.
This was his thing, his path break in, get caught,
promise to stop break in again. In nineteen eighty one,
he and some friends just walked into Pacific Bell's Cosmos
facility and walked out with passwords and system manuals. He
(03:15):
got probation. In nineteen eighty three, he was caught breaking
into Pentagon ad Jason systems from a university terminal. Juvenile
detention was what he got. By nineteen eighty eight, he
had hacked into Digital Equipment Corporation and copied the source
code for their VMS operating system, one of the most
(03:35):
important pieces of software in the world at that time.
That got him a year in federal prison and a
lot of press because at his bail hearing, a federal
prosecutor told the judge that Kevin Mitnick was so dangerous
he could quote whistle into a telephone and launch a
nuclear missile from Norad just one thing. This was not
(03:56):
a thing he couldn't have done. That never was a thing,
But the judge bought it, and Kevin spent eight months
of his sentence in solitary confinement, not because of anything
he did, but because of what officials imagined he might
be able to do with the phone. Problem is, prison
didn't cure the compulsion for him. It was never about
(04:17):
making money. It was simply the thrill of the hack.
He literally collected source codes like somebody else might collect
baseball cards. Even the psychologist who evaluated him compared it
to a gambling addiction. Then, in nineteen ninety two, while
on supervised release, the FBI came knocking with a warrant
(04:37):
and Kevin vanished for almost three years. Using new names
and fake birth certificates. He took jobs at a law
firm in Denver and in Seattle in a hospital it department.
He ran marathons under an alias. He just moved on
when the heat turned up. Of course, he kept hacking
all that time, Motorola, Nokia Son micro Systems. He talked
(05:01):
to Motorola employee into literally sending him the source code
for their flagship cell phone over the phone, using nothing
but charm and a believable story. He was untouchable right
up until Christmas Day nineteen ninety four, when he hacked
the wrong guy's computer. Sou Toomo Shimomorro was a computational
(05:23):
physicist and security expert in San Diego, and he took
the hack personally. Shima Moorro made it his mission to
find the hacker. It became one of the great man
hunts of the early digital age. It was nineteen ninety five,
No Google, no GPS in your pocket. Shimomura and the
FBI traced the intrusions through phone switches and cellular networks
(05:46):
city by city until the trail pointed to Raleigh, North Carolina.
Then they wrote around in the dark with a cellular
frequency direction finding antenna. Huh well, they watched a signal
grow stronger, blocked by block until it led to Kevin's apartment.
At one thirty in the morning on February fifteenth, nineteen
(06:07):
ninety five, the FBI knocked on his door. His run
was over. He spent four and a half years in
pre trial detention without a trial, denied bail, denied for
a stretch, even access to a laptop to review the
evidence against him. He's too dangerous, they said. Then suddenly
the hacker community went nuts. They picketed courthouses, Free Kevin.
(06:31):
Bumper stickers appeared, websites were defaced with his name. He
became a symbol of a government that punished what it
didn't understand. Eventually, he pled guilty with time served. He
walked out of prison on January twenty first, two thousand,
but for three years he was barred from touching a computer,
a cell phone, or anything with a processor in it.
(06:54):
He was even briefly forbidden from being near a fax machine.
The most famous hacker on earth exiled from the digital
world that was his life. Now here's what's amazing. It
turns out the first half of Kevin Mitnick's life had
perfectly prepared him for the second half of his life.
He was now the world's most credible authority on how
(07:16):
systems get broken. He founded Mitnick's security consulting Fortune. Five
hundred companies and governments paid him to break into their
networks with their permission this time, and his team's success
rate on penetration tests was famously close to perfect. He
became chief hacking officer and part owner of No Before,
(07:39):
a security awareness company built around the very lesson he'd
learned on those LA buses human beings are always the
weakest link. He rote best sellers The Art of Deception,
The Art of Intrusion, and his memoir Ghost in the Wires,
which hit the New York Times bestseller list. He testified
before the US Senate. He packed auditoriums doing live hacking demonstrations,
(08:04):
and his business card it was a fully functional stainless
steel lock pick kit. He was a showman. Kevin Mitnick
died July sixteenth, twenty twenty three, at just fifty nine
after a battle with pancreatic cancer, survived by his wife, Kimberly,
who was expecting their first child. She continues in the
(08:24):
cybersecurity business. After his death. Tributes came from FBI agents
and hackers alike, which tells you everything about the arc
of his life, because in the end, Kevin Mitnick's story
was never really about computers. It was about a lonely
kid who discovered that every lock door has a human
being next to it holding the key, and that if
(08:47):
you ask just right, they'll hand it to you with
a smile. These days, the systems have changed, but the
trick hasn't. Somewhere right now, somebody's phone is ringing and
a friend lee voice is asking what sounds like an
innocent question. We've all been there, so think before you answer.
(09:08):
I hope you're enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Please
leave a review and follow or subscribe for free to
get new episodes delivered automatically, and feel free to DM
me if you have a story you'd like me to cover.
On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
(09:29):
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
Premiere Networks, the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions.
Our producer is Mike Pieseglia. Our writer is Jake Kushner.
New episodes are out every Tuesday and Friday, and feel
free to reach out to me with comments and story
suggestions on Instagram at Reel Patty Steele and on Facebook
(09:50):
at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with
Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't know, you
needed to know, but don't you tell
Host
Patty Steele
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