Porches and Pacific Bell Dumpsters
In 1990 in Los Angeles, California, Michael B. Peters won a Porsche from the Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM. Well...not really.
Kevin Poulsen is a well-known hacker who took over all the telephone lines for the radio station on June 1st, 1990. The station had a contest set for that day, when Prince’s “Kiss” started playing, the 102nd caller would win a Porsche 944 S2. Poulsen was only 25 when he tapped into these phone lines and blocked every call but his own, ensuring he would be caller #102. When Poulsen won he gave the name Michael B. Peters to cover his tracks. But this example of his hacking abilities is surprisingly mild in comparison to his other feats.
Poulsen spent the time he was supposed to be in school, honing his hacking skills and phone phreaking to make calls for free. He went by the handle Dark Dante and had been up to his regular antics when, at 17, he made a new friend, Austin. Their shared interest in hacking made them inseparable. Until, of course, Austin was taken into custody. He and Poulsen had managed to gain access to computers at SRI, Rand Corp., and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. among several other universities and research institutes. By September of 1983 they had been caught. Austin was arrested and charged with 14 counts of malicious access. He only spent around two months in custody. Poulsen on the other hand was not charged, instead he received a job offer.
The SRI hired him with a salary of $35,000 a year to teach the military how to safeguard the same computers that Poulsen had just hacked. He was granted security clearance and worked for a department responsible for the security codes that protected communication between SRI and the military. He seemed satisfied with this position until 1988 when the truth started to come out. It all came out of a storage unit. This particular unit was behind on rent and when it was opened by the owner of the facility, the police were immediately contacted. The unit was full of alarming items, from birth certificates to phone company manuals, it was full of stolen equipment and information. There was even a piece of paper that contained the unpublished phone number for the Soviet embassy in San Francisco. It wasn’t difficult to trace the stolen property straight to Poulsen. He had gotten cocky and taken pictures of himself with the equipment and then stored them in the same unit. He was taken into custody and his apartment was searched. In the search police found a plethora of new incriminating evidence including a huge phone monitoring system, switching devices, and telecommunication panels. Turns out Poulsen had been breaking into Pacific Bell facilities, both physically and digitally. He has stolen passwords, manuals, and equipment using an old ID card he found in one of the Pacific Bell dumpsters. The officers seized these items and left, unfortunately, so did Poulsen. He went underground and on the run from the FBI who acquired charges for conspiracy, fraud, and wiretapping against him. However, it didn’t stop there. Even on the run Poulsen continued his hacking, using a phone number for a Pacific Bell circuit to call FBI agents and taunt them about the indictment. During his time on the run, the show “Unsolved Mysteries” ran a segment on Poulsen. Except the day that it aired, the show’s open phone line for tips went down. It was never confirmed who was behind the incident, but it seems like a stretch to call this just a plain coincidence.
After 17 months, Poulsen was arrested by the FBI in a supermarket after being recognized by one of its managers. He was reportedly tackled to the ground by two employees before being held in the office to await the officers.
Like Mitnick, Poulsen too went on a bit of a redemption arc. After serving 5 years in prison plus probation and payment of substantial restitution, he became a journalist for WIRED and published a book entitled “Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground”. He also developed SecureDrop, a platform for secure communication between sources and journalists, with Aaron Swartz and James Dolan. Some of his most notable work included writing code that tracked down over 700 sex offenders via Myspace to aid in bringing them to justice.
