Californian Held In Computer Case

Californian Held In Computer Case

By John Markoff
The New York Times

December 26, 1988

A Southern California man accused of stealing computer programs from the Digital Equipment Corporation is being held without bail in a Los Angeles jail on the orders of a Federal magistrate, who said the man posed a threat to the community when armed with a computer.

The 25-year-old suspect, a veteran computer intruder who has had numerous encounters with law-enforcement and corporate computer security officials in the past eight years, has been barred from making unsupervised telephone calls from jail because the authorities fear he could tap into a computer with the telephone.

The suspect, Kevin D. Mitnick, was arrested Dec. 9 and was indicted by a Federal grand jury last Tuesday on charges of forcing Digital to spend more than $4 million in tracking his electronic intrusions into the company's nationwide computer network.

Leon Weidman, an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles, said Mr. Mitnick used telephone lines to enter computer systems remotely and steal software valued at $1 million. Mr. Mitnick, of Panorama City, is also accused of using unauthorized long-distance service codes to avoid telephone charges while tapping into computer systems at Leeds University in England. Mr. Mitnick is believed not to have acted alone, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has interviewed at least one other suspect in the case.

Little Formal Training

Mr. Mitnick has little formal computer training but is highly skilled and has been involved with a shadowy outlaw computer underground at least since he was 16 years old, according to a member of the investigation who asked not to be named.

The investigator said Mr. Mitnick's reason for breaking into the company's computers was unknown, but some suspected that he ultimately planned to blackmail Digital by distributing information related to security flaws in the company's computers.

Mr. Mitnick tried to conceal his location by masquerading as a member of a group of German computer enthusiasts, the investigator said. In 1987, Digital machines used by a worldwide National Aeronautics and Space Administration computer network were the target of the so-called Chaos Computer Club. Digital officials have not commented on the case.

Mr. Mitnick's court-appointed lawyer, Anthony J. Patti, disputed the portrait drawn by investigators. ''They think that he is able to pick a phone up and ruin people's credit rating,'' Mr. Patti said. ''But he didn't make a dime on this. Some companies may have been hurt because he showed there was a crack in their security systems.''

In May 1980 Mr. Mitnick was caught for the first time by the campus police at the University of California at Los Angeles and was accused of using campus systems to gain access to computer networks. He was not prosecuted.

Membership in Group

Computer security investigators said that as a teen-ager Mr. Mitnick belonged to a shadowy Southern California group of computer enthusiasts, the Roscoe Gang, who met in a pizza parlor in the Los Angeles area. The group also stayed in contact through a variety of computer bulletin board systems, including one, 8BBS Santa Clara, California, run by an employees of the Digital.

In 1981 Mr. Mitnick and three other group members were arrested on charges of stealing technical manuals from the Pacific Telephone Company. Mr. Mitnick was convicted and served six months in a youth detention center.

He was caught again by University of Southern California officials in 1983 trying to break into the school's computers. In another incident, Mr. Mitnick fled to Israel to avoid prosecution after being accused of tampering with a computer storing credit information at TRW Inc.

In December 1987 he was convicted of stealing software from Microport Systems in Santa Cruz, and was sentenced to 36 months' probation.

In the most recent incident, Mr. Mitnick successfully eluded Federal law-enforcement officials and computer scientists for more than six months before being betrayed by a friend and was caught by Federal agents.

Code for Computer Program

A member of the California computer underground who is familiar with Mr. Mitnick's activities said the Southern California man had obtained the complete text, or ''source code,'' of Digital's VMS operating system program as well as a special security program. Source code is particularly valuable for anyone intent on breaking into a computer system because it permits a detailed examination of how a program functions. The text may have been taken from a military computer and not stolen directly from a Digital computer.

Mr. Mitnick was able to avoid being apprehended by tampering with telephone company switching equipment to mask his location, he said.

The F.B.I. was able to catch him only after he threatened a friend, Leonard DiCicco, in an effort to force him to let Mr. Mitnick use a Digital terminal where Mr. DiCicco worked. Mr. DiCicco contacted the F.B.I., which set up an operation to trap him.

Mr. Mitnick was the focus of Pacific Telephone Company investigators this year. In an internal memorandum expressing telephone company ''alarm'' about ''sophisticated hackers,'' Mr. Mitnick was singled out for the activities that led to his 1987 arrest.

The memorandum said that disks found at the time of his arrest indicated that Mr. Mitnick had compromised all the telephone company's switching systems.