Kevin Mitnick (1963-2023)

Earlier this week I was informed that Kevin Mitnick, the “world’s most infamous hacker,” had passed away. I was asked to sit on the news until the family had time to release a statement, but word travels fast and this morning it appeared on the front page of the New York Post.

For those who haven’t heard or read the story, back in the mid-2000s my wife, who was in charge of putting together a training class at work, hired Kevin Mitnick to travel to Oklahoma and teach a course on social engineering. Susan knew how into computers and security I was and had heard me mention Mitnick’s name many times. As you might imagine, getting permission to bring Kevin Mitnick and his friend and business partner Alex Kasper onto a federal campus took some string pulling, but Susan managed to pull it off. This would have been approximately six years after Mitnick had been released from federal prison on hacking charges, and only three since his probation barring him from using computers or electronic devices had been lifted. One stipulation from management was that Mitnick and Kasper would be accompanied at all times while they were on the campus, and it was almost embarrassing how quickly I volunteered for that job. For three days, I followed Kevin and Alex around like a shadow, something I probably would have done anyway. After hours, we took the two of them sight seeing, out for dinner, to a country and western bar (which I got tossed out of), and even spent time at a Waffle House at two in the morning.

As I mentioned in the blog post where I documented that week, I started the week excited about meeting Kevin Mitnick the celebrity, and ended up meeting Kevin Mitnick the person. Yes, I got his autograph and he gave me copies of his books (and I gave him copies of mine!), but the real fun happened after the ice had been broken and we were able to swap old stories about computers, networks, and phone systems.

I have always been interested in computer security, and a couple of years after Kevin’s class I changed jobs and moved to a security team where I spent a couple of years traveling the country and testing the networks of other government agencies. On one of those trips we discovered several employees had connected modems to their machines and were dialing into them remotely from home, circumventing the agency’s firewall and every other network security system that had been established. To find the machines I ended up in a hotel conference room late one night with four modems and phone lines connected to my laptop, wardialing the entire office looking for those modems. It felt like a scene right out of the 80s, so I took a picture of that crazy setup and sent it to Kevin. He got a real kick out of it.

Mitnick and I were not close friends, but we did remain in contact through social media. We talked about meeting up for coffee when Susan and I were in Vegas, but the timing didn’t work out. I always got a kick when he liked a picture I had posted on Facebook or Twitter, usually of an old computer or payphone.

Kevin Mitnick’s life had the potential to go a lot of different ways. Not everyone who emerges from federal prison is able to turn over a new leaf and go straight, but Kevin was one of them. He turned his passion for security into a career that has lasted nearly 20 years. For all the trouble he had with federal agencies over the years, I’m glad ours took a chance on him and helped launch his career in cybersecurity. Kevin Mitnick was an interesting, creative, funny, and dangerously smart individual. I’m glad I had the opportunity to meet him.