How San Diego Man Set Electronic Trap For Notorious Hacker Susan Sward, Jim Doyle, Pamela Burdman, Chronicle Staff Writers In a courtroom in Raleigh, N.C., a 31-year-old man with an obsession about computers will stand in handcuffs today and hear prosecutors argue that he should not be freed on bail, because he is the world's most wanted hacker. Kevin D. Mitnick, whose troubles with computers and the law date back to his youth in the San Fernando Valley, could face 35 years behind bars and a $500,000 fine if convicted of the two federal charges against him -- computer fraud and illegal use of a telephone access device. In the courtroom audience is expected to be a 30-year-old computational physicist named Tsutomu Shimomura, one of the nation's foremost computer security experts, who made cracking the case his business after his files were broken into on Christmas Day. As prosecutors prepared to make their case to U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Dixon that Mitnick should be kept behind bars until his trial, details emerged yesterday about how FBI agents ended up encircling a 12- unit Raleigh apartment complex and nabbing him Wednesday. ``The FBI wanted him for two years,'' the soft-spoken Shimomura said in a telephone interview last night from Raleigh. ``We wanted him for two weeks -- after we knew who he was. Once we decided who it was, it didn't take too long to find him. We got a lot of cooperation from a lot of people, in law enforcement and in the industry.'' In the end, Shimomura said: ``Mitnick was just pretty sloppy in general, which enabled us to track him. He caused a lot of us grief, but I don't think he is technically that skilled, and also he could have done much more damage if he wanted to.'' WANTED SINCE 1992 Sought by the FBI since 1992 for a probation violation on a computer theft charge, authorities say Mitnick triggered events leading to his arrest when he used hacking techniques to break into computer files at Shi- Shimomura said last night that following the theft of more than 30,000 pages of hard copy from his files, he began focusing on the case closely. By the end of January, he had seen enough evidence to make him conclude that the man who crept into his files electronically and copied them was Mitnick -- a notorious figure in the computer world. ``The real motivation for tracking him, for putting together a team to go after him, was that we considered this was not acceptable behavior, and it will not be tolerated,'' said Shimomura, a senior fellow at a federally financed computer research center in San Diego and a senior researcher at the University of California at San Diego's School of Engineering. The affidavit filed in Raleigh cites ``the attack'' on Shimomura's system. The affidavit also cites entries into the systems of two Internet service providers, the Sausalito-based WELL and the San Jose- based Netcom Communications Inc. Sources familiar with the case said Mitnick's booty included ``thousands of credit card numbers, including those belonging to some of the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley.'' Shimomura said that material found also included computer software controlling the operations of cellular phones. ``One of the reasons I think he broke into my machine is I work with companies that do work for cellular companies,'' he said. Shimomura's files also included ``some of the tools we have used to track these guys. I believe he was after those tools.'' INTERNET SECURITY DEBATED The publicity over Mitnick's arrest and the apparent magnitude of his electronic pilfering set off a flurry of debate yesterday over the lack of security on the Internet network. Shimomura himself said Mitnick's arrest does not end the problem. ``We need to address the issue of building secure systems,'' said Shimomura, who is working on a software program he plans to offer free on the Internet to help detect and prevent hacking. Others agreed. ``Putting a credit card number on the Internet right now is like leaving your door open in a high-crime neighborhood,'' said Jim Bidzos, whose Redwood City company RSA is one of the nation's top computer security businesses. Major Internet companies that want businesses to use the network to sell products have been scrambling for ways to secure credit card transactions and company computers from hackers, but ``the systems are very permeable now,'' said Eugene Spafford of Purdue University. ``A lot more energy is going into convincing companies to get consumers to use the network to buy products than is going into protecting themselves and their customers from people hacking the systems,'' he said. Nowhere in the government's 10-page affidavit is there any mention of the road that Mitnick, an unemployed computer programmer, traveled before ending up behind bars. The turf where Mitnick operated was the Internet, a global web of computer networks used by about 20 million customers. Prosecutors will not say how many people he victimized, but they say he was stealing information worth more than $1 million. To his detractors, Mitnick is a computer terrorist, a man of no conscience. To others who have defended or counseled him, he is a man who looks at hacking as the ultimate challenge -- ``It's Mount Everest -- because it's there,'' as one of his lawyers put it. Mitnick has been honing his computer skills for a long time. He first got into trouble at Monroe High School in Los Angeles when he tapped into school district computers. The son of a waitress in the San Fernando Valley, Mitnick was placed on probation for stealing computer manuals from Pacific Bell. A year later, he and a friend broke into a computer used by the North American Air Defense Command, and in 1989 he was sentenced to serve one year at the low-security federal facility at Lompoc after he was convicted of stealing software from Digital Equipment Corp. When he disappeared in November 1992, FBI agents searched his home with a warrant stating he had been breaking into telephone company computers. Federal agents had hunted Mitnick ever since, but it was not until the electronic theft from the computer at Shimomura's beach cottage that the case slowly began cracking open. HOW TRAP WAS LAID Interviews with law enforcement and industry sources close to the case provide a picture of how an intensive, electronic manhunt brought Mitnick down: Internet devotees were first put on guard about the security threat last month after Shimomura told a Northern California computer conference about the theft of his files, and the Pennsylvania- based Computer Emergency Response Team issued an on-line alert. Several days later, Mitnick left more tracks when he broke into an account set up by Berkeley computer programmer Bruce Koball for the public policy group called ``Computers, Freedom, and Privacy'' which opposes government intrusion in the computer world. Mitnick's activity in that account at the Sausalito-based WELL was noticed by the staff on January 27 during a routine scan designed to find over-stuffed accounts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Walker said Mitnick had stored about 100,000 pages of stolen data in the WELL, including data belonging to Shimomura. Using monitoring posts first at the WELL and then at Netcom in San Jose, Shimomura and government investigators tracked the hacker's activities in the last two weeks, watching his patterns. By last Saturday, Shimomura had concluded that Mitnick was the thief -- based on the information the hacker was stealing, including phone company records of the sort Mitnick was interested in. Relying on a software tracking method of his own, Shimomura traced Mitnick's whereabouts to somewhere in Raleigh. By Sunday, he was on a flight to the Raleigh- Durham International Airport, and by early Monday morning -- working with local telephone company officials and federal agents -- Shimomura helped nail down the intruder's location even more precisely -- a 12-unit apartment complex north of Raleigh. After a 24-hour stakeout, the FBI arrested Mitnick. In a Raleigh courtroom at a prearraignment hearing Wednesday, the two men with shoulder- length hair -- computer sleuth Shimomura and computer fraud defendant Mitnick -- met face to face for the first time. ``Hello, Tsutomu,'' Mitnick said to Shimomura. ``I respect your skills.'' Shimomura said he nodded in response. ``He did not look very happy,'' Shimomura recalled. ``My feeling was he had caused a lot of grief for a lot of people, and he had incentive to stop. He had been to prison before, and he still continued. ``It wasn't acceptable behavior, and something had to happen. It seemed throwing someone in prison is a very inelegant way of stopping someone. I wish there were an elegant way.'' _________________________________________________________________ DAY: FRIDAY DATE: 2/17/95 PAGE: A1 © 2/17/95 , San Francisco Chronicle, All Rights Reserved, All Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited