wired.com — The two pros, security researcher Dan Kaminsky and former hacker Kevin Mitnick, were targeted because of their high profiles and because the hackers considered the two notables posers who hype themselves and do little to increase security, according to a note the hackers posted in a file left on Kaminsky’s site.
Jul 29, 2009 View in Crawl 4
tsothaJul 29, 2009
Mitnick was never a "hacker" in the sense most people use the word. He was a con-man who called people on the phone and weaseled out their passwords, or he physically broke in to facilities to get access to maintenance terminals. That was back when very few people understood anything about computers, too, so many systems had no real security by today's standards.
Closed AccountJul 30, 2009
this war between white hats and black hats is pretty much the gayest thing since east coast against west coastkeep on fighting that good fight haha
Closed AccountJul 30, 2009
Betcha Mitnick dusts off his Cap'n Crunch whistle and nukes the bastards.
tsothaJul 30, 2009
I may be older than you. Yes, I remember Mitnick, the "phone phreaks" and all the other losers who broke into corporate systems. The point is it wasn't that difficult, by today's standards. The technical skills you needed to operate computers weren't very widespread when they were new, so security wasn't anywhere near as tight as it is now. It didn't need to be - everyone who knew exactly what they were doing worked for the manufacturer or was employed by the owner of the system.As the technical skills became more widespread there was a time period where somebody with basic computer skills could easily break in to a wide variety of legacy systems from the more innocent times. Then, as now, the truly skilled technical people were on the other side trying to make things work instead of breaking them. So Mitnick cajoled a password out of someone over the phone and downloaded code from DEC? So what? How does this indicate any sort of technical prowess? Anyone can do it if he's willing to risk going to prison. The people on the other side of the phone were easier marks, too. These days every twelve-year-old knows about pretexting, but back then most business-types had only the vaguest idea of how computers worked, and hadn't given any thought at all to security. You just don't see that kind of ignorance any more.
pauldyJul 30, 2009
Funny seeing all the comments in here, I'm guessing I"m not the only one who has never heard of Kaminsky.
bigbruiserAug 6, 2009
Hey guys, I found a great site for tutorials on hacking, have a look at the digg here:<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/security/Hacking_for_Windows_hacks_sniffing_exploits">http://digg.com/security/Hacking_for_Windows_hacks ...</a>
centerworldSep 21, 2009
Mitnick is more of a social engineer than a hacker and he couldn't touch a PC for years after he got out,but he does very well