« March, 2012 »
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker 
by Kevin Mitnik (2011)
read: 15 March 2012
rating: [+]
category: biography
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker is Kevin Mitnick’s memoirs of his life as the most notorious hacker in America. For a guy that attracted so much attention from law enforcement, he did remarkably little damage. It reads like a thriller, with Kevin frequently not that far ahead of the Feds that were hunting him, until the day that they caught him. One thing that struck me, he was truly addicted to hacking. He’d been to jail already, he knew they were tracking him, tracing his calls, bugging his phone, but he just couldn’t stop. It’s not like he needed the money from it, because he didn’t make any. He downloaded the source code for all the newest cell phones, and simply stashed the code on a server like a trophy. His greatest talent wasn’t really computer hacking. It was social engineering. He is a very talented Unix admin, but his preferred way of getting into a network was simply getting an employee to give him an account and a password. His arrest and incarceration was a complete sham. I want to write it off as a lack of clue on the part of law enforcement, but I don’t think that is it. The sophistication involved in the effort to track him down was impressive. I don’t think the people that did that really believed he could launch missiles by calling NORAD and whistling into the phone. The brain dead judges probably did believe it though.
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