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If you’re any kind of car geek, you have a wild gift car fantasy. You meet a bitter divorcee who gives away an ex’s prized machine out of pure spite; or maybe the guy whose tire you stopped to change turns out to be a flip-flop billionaire who rewards you with your exact spec because it’s simply collecting dust that week, and hey, you stopped; your humanity’s worth a Dodge Viper to a guy who can afford to run a bidet on day-old moon water, or something.
OK, that one might be mine.
As plausible as we’d like these scenarios to be, they just don’t happen that often. The first pop-culture example to spring to mind—John Cusack’s Rob Gordon scoring a vinyl collection from a jilted ex in “High Fidelity“—ended up on the cutting room floor, and in a movie where the same character comically fantasizes about his colleagues beating a phenomenally douchey Tim Robbins with an air conditioner (Go ahead; we both know you want to click that).
Fear not; nobody gets bludgeoned in this story, but it’s pretty wild nonetheless. It’ll help if you know the name Kevin Mitnick. He was a hacker-turned-security consultant who, later in life, helped shape the modern white-hat. Just how prototypical was Mitnick? He put himself on the proverbial map in 1979 by dialing into a software company’s server and copying its forthcoming operating system release in its entirety. Imagine convincing a Microsoft server to cough over an early copy of Windows 12 using little more than a phone number.
Some online criticism implies that Mitnick was more of a social engineer than a “hacker” in the sense that we distinguish them today, but the reality is that a great deal of “hacking” is still dependent on an authorized user making a mistake—usually by revealing sensitive login data. For a reasonably realistic take on modern black-hatting, I recommend Mr. Robot; be warned, that series is heavy.
So, how do we get from old-school hacker to wild gift-car fantasy? In this case, by way of 14 counts of felony wire fraud. That’s where Shawn Nunley comes in.
Back in the ’90s, Nunley worked for Novell, a now-defunct brand that produced enterprise software—server operating systems, messaging systems, that sort of thing. GroupWise is probably its best-known brand among the general public today, but the juicy target back then was NetWare, which was the backbone of many a corporate/government/academic network. Naturally, this made it a valuable target for a hacker like Mitnick.
“Back in the 90s, Kevin was trying very hard to hack into Novell’s network,” Nunley wrote. “I was a network administrator. Of course, we had no idea it was Kevin, but things were happening that made it fairly obvious we had a persistent threat. Phones ringing sequentially throughout the building (war dialing) and all sorts of other signs… we knew something was up.”
This was Mitnick, using a slightly more sophisticated version of the same tactic that earned him his first big score in 1979.
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