Kevin Mitnick, one of the world’s most famous computer hackers and the subject of a more than two-year investigation in the 1990s, died last Sunday at the age of 59 from complications from pancreatic cancer. new york times.
Mitnick is a legendary figure, one of those whose lives are like fine fiction. At the age of 12 Punch his card for free bus rides After starting his career with his machines, he became accustomed to phone phreaking and hacking, infiltrating networks owned by companies such as Digital Equipment His Corporation. Police were not very enthusiastic about this, and in 1988 he was sentenced to one year in prison and three years of supervised release.
He made it all but unscathed, but nearing the end of his supervised release, an arrest warrant was issued for hacking into the Pacific Bell telephone company, an investigation that lasted more than two years and ended in five years in prison (he served four and a half years of his previous trial). According to him, he spent eight months in solitary confinement after that sentence because the police convinced the judge that “he could do it.”Whistle into the phone and start a nuclear war”.
But perhaps someone at some point realized how nonsensical this statement was. After finishing its directed release in 2003, that’s all The technology Mitnick had been granted access to for some time was landlines.
Mitnick’s legal woes turned him into something of a virtuoso in the ’90s. At the time, stickers reading “Release Kevin” were common on bumpers and his IT departments at universities, and both Yahoo and his NYT were hacked to display messages calling for his release. To many, he has become a symbol of the state’s authoritarian incomprehension of the Internet’s anarchic free spirit. But for me? Well, I have to admit that my first exposure to him was (most of all) through Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, the game’s talk radio station.
The caller, whose name was Kevin, apparently played an uncredited play by Mitnick himself, ranting at the host about being put in solitary confinement for hacking, saying, “You can launch a nuclear missile just by whistling into your phone.” To be honest, when I learned that this movie was based on the absurd real-life experience of a real person, it stuck with me.
But the world’s most wanted hacker ultimately found success. After his release in the 2000s, Mitnick became a writer, speaker, security consultant to his, ran penetration testing services, and generally sought to help companies defend themselves against people like Kevin his Mitnick.
Mitnick is survived by his wife, Kimberly, who is expecting their first child. An obituary posted at the Dignity Memorial Funeral Home reads that his friends and family “will miss him for the rest of his days and look forward to hearing his voice in our hearts and looking forward to reuniting with him in what we each believe to be the afterlife. Perhaps imagining Kev being there to greet us and perhaps play pranks or invite us to share a wonderful meal and conversation would be heaven on earth.”