Originally published at: Kevin Mitnick, 1963-2023 | Boing Boing
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That’s sad. He was a complicated figure - demonized by the authorities to a ridiculous degree. Really? He could launch the nukes if given access to a payphone? His second act was interesting, and I was glad that he was able to reenter tech after all of that.
Fuck cancer.
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Ditto.
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Sad to read. That is too young. Respect.
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I wasn’t super familiar with him, but the name rang a bell because I got an advance reader’s copy of a book he released just a few years ago, The Art of Invisibility. He sounded like a very interesting and talented individual. I’d imagined him younger, but 59 is still a sadly early age to go out.
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What a thoroughly interesting guy.
Around 20 years ago, I was studying computer science and having some beers with fellow nerds. One of them was an AI grad student who had met Kevin at a conference.
He told the story of meeting Kevin and getting his card. It was made of laser cut steel and contained a tear out lockpick set.
We all thought that was the coolest thing in the world, considering he was the world’s most famous hacker.
The grad student then proceeded to pull the card from his wallet and show it to us. Kevin’s card had such a big impact in n this guy that he carried it with him ALL THE TIME!
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His Ghost in the Wires is a great read. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to learn about not only the things he did, but also how he was able to get away with it and evade the authorities for so long.
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It really is a good read. His main skill as a hacker was through his ability to recall names and phone numbers and his ability to influence people. The technical aspect was almost inconsequential
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His history came up a little bit during the book I read, but it wasn’t the focus. Thanks for the recommendation, I just added it to my library wishlist!
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His activities at The Well reminded me of an old question.
The Well,[3] was launched in 1985.
Does anyone know of any kind of snapshot of what the initial WELL looked like? Somewhere down the years, I heard that their initial UI had been inspired from Access (launched 1983), and I’d always wondered.
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Thirded.
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Whatever one thinks of his personality, Mitnick was a critical and even necessary figure in the development of the digital culture that’s now inextricable from everyday life in the West. No human-created system of any sort is complete without a trickster to show it’s not nearly as unassailable, seamless and foolproof as its proponents claim. During the early days of BBS’s and the Internet Mitnick fulfilled that role.
If there’s one lesson he taught everyone about infosec, it’s that the social engineering hack will always be more powerful than the technological one.
He died too young.
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Back in the 90’s, when he was released and in a car headed from the prison, he saw a billboard with the company’s URL on it. He said in an interview soon thereafter that it was the moment he realized everything had changed while he had been incarcerated, and that his world was now public.
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Mitnick was a bit of a hero for me in my younger years. Complicated.
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I too have this card, though I keep mine in the basement, hanging on the pegboard wall with all of the other useful tools. Didn’t lose any of the parts either.
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Kevin was a big part of KnowBe4, our company’s security education partner.
Their blog post on him has a link to the official obituary, which is itself a good read.
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don’t know about Access - i was on the Well in the early 90’s (back when Mitnick hacked it and pissed everyone off) and their UI was all text based (i think we were using Mosaic as a browser then) - in this video Howard Rheingold gives a demo of the Well (around the 18:30 mark) and shows what was extant then
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+… many.
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Thanks. I was interested in their early text-only interface.
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