Kevin Mitnick

Today, through Hacker News, I received the news that Kevin Mitnick died, and I was quite sad. He was one of the first hackers I knew and was a great inspiration to me.

The first contact I had with information security, as far as I can recall, was when I heard about a virus that spread through Word. I was taking a computer network maintenance course at Bit Company and overheard two teachers discussing how to put an executable inside Word. When I heard that, I was fascinated—how was such a thing possible? Isn’t Word just for text?

I tried to get them to explain it to me, but they refused. It was almost forbidden knowledge, which made me even more curious to discover what it was.

After that, surfing the World Wide Web, I started learning about networks, ports, trojans, worms, and delving even deeper into the computing rabbit hole.

Driven by this thirst, I got a book on hacking—the first computing book I ever read: The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick.

So you’re telling me I’m wasting my time learning about buffer overflows while a guy just makes a phone call and invades a system? Is that for real?

“Hi there, how are you? My name is Jonas from the company. Wow, you won’t believe it—I lost access to the system, and Mr. So-and-so will kill me if he finds out. Could you give me the system password? He’ll be very upset to know you didn’t help me! Thank you, you saved my life.”

What an incredible book. Social engineering is something that really opens your mind—thinking outside the box, thinking like the other person, understanding how the system works. No matter the system—big companies, governments—they’re all made up of people. And people are flawed; people are manipulable. A good hacker has the power to topple empires with just a phone call.

When you like something, have a feeling for it, and find other people who share that same feeling, it’s really cool. You don’t feel so alone and a bit more normal. That’s how I felt reading Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick. The nights spent at the computer, the fascination with the machine, the intellectual challenge, the adrenaline when something works. Plus, understanding how old computers worked adds great flavor to the book.

RIP Mitnick, happy hacking on the other side.