1/22/2024 0 Comments Hacking prankTech magazine Wired took him to task a few years ago, for instance, when it revealed he was involved in selling "zero-day" exploits: hacking tools that take advantage of software bugs for which no patch yet exists. He still describes himself as a hacker and while he is usually seen as being a “white hat” one as he’s operating on the right side of the law, he has occasionally been accused of drifting over to the dark side. These days, Mitnick makes his living working as a penetration tester and security consultant, and also tours the world doing live hacks in front of audiences. They are easy to do and really hard to defend,” he adds. A lot of people still fall for these types of attacks. The domain name hadn’t been registered so I did it and then set up a login page and called the company and convinced someone in there to enter their details. “I recently tested a big name client’s security systems and was able to get all their internal records in five minutes simply by finding out what cloud service they used for their human resources. I mean it does to the extent that we have to practise our craft to be able to bypass current security methods, but the best hacks still rely on social engineering,” Mitnick says. “Technology has changed but the tech itself doesn’t really matter. The man himself prefers to describe his hacking techniques as social engineering tricks by which he could talk people into giving away critical information such as passwords.Īs he makes clear, such tricks still lie at the heart of successful hacking attacks. The New York Times once described Mitnick as someone who combined "technical wizardry with the ages-old guile of a grifter". That’s when I got into a lot of trouble,” he says. I then started targeting cell phone manufacturers and doing stuff like taking their source code offline so I could look at it. But then it got more serious where I started to want to understand how the technology worked. “It was all about pulling better pranks initially by doing stuff like changing a friend’s home phone so it would demand a payment each time their parent tried to make a call, that kind of thing. Mitnick got into it as well and before long had progressed beyond the basics and was busy hacking into the early computer networks that companies were all adopting. That kid was into phone phreaking, an early form of hacking that involved individuals successfully tapping into telephone systems. He loved fooling friends with tricks and when he was introduced to a fellow youngster who seemed to be able to do magic with phones, he wanted in. Mitnick says it was magic that led him into hacking. It has become a huge money-making venture.” Magic “The motivation for me was that it was fun and an intellectual challenge but for many hackers now it’s about fraud, espionage and so on. Mitnick, who is from Los Angeles, says that when he started hacking, it wasn’t for the same reasons people do it now. Having been sentenced to five years after agreeing a plea bargain, the harsh treatment continued for Mitnick after he left prison with a ban on using any form of communications technology other than a landline telephone for a period. It is hard to believe anyone in their right mind would have believed that so I don’t know if the judge was stupid, or if the authorities simply wanted to throw the book at me to send a message out about what happens if you engage in the type of behaviour I was engaged in,” he adds. “Another is that the federal judiciary was so naive that they really did believe I could launch nuclear weapons by whistling into a payphone, as was alleged. That’s one line of thought,” says Mitnick on what happened after he was apprehended. Maybe I pissed off the FBI so much by making them look so foolish that they decided to punish me by making my conditions as bad as possible. “They didn’t know what to do was part of it. Mitnick himself says it was right that he should have been punished for his actions but adds that what he was doing at the time didn’t cause any real harm to anyone and wasn’t at that point illegal either. There were many – both at the time and since – who felt that he was treated harshly. Having outwitted FBI agents to such a degree that he was able to wiretap the guys who were chasing him, they tried to throw the book at him – once they apprehended him. Mitnick laughs as he recalls what happened after he was caught by the FBI in 1995 following a year-and-a-half-long pursuit.
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