Kevin Mitnick's 'lost' bio (The Register) [LWN.net]

The Register takes a look at Kevin Mitnick's book, The Art of Deception, and also prints the auto-biographical chapter that the publisher's left out of the book. "After high school I studied computers at the Computer Learning Center in Los Angeles. Within a few months, the school's computer manager realized I had found a vulnerability in the operating system and gained full administrative privileges on their IBM minicomputer. The best computer experts on their teaching staff couldn't figure out how I had done this. In what may have been one of the earliest examples of "hire the hacker," I was given an offer I couldn't refuse: Do an honors project to enhance the school's computer security, or face suspension for hacking the system. Of course I chose to do the honors project, and ended up graduating Cum Laude with Honors." Thanks to Paul Sladen

(Log in to post comments)

Is Mitnick to be trusted?

Posted Jan 15, 2003 19:32 UTC (Wed) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]

It is an intersting article. However, why should readers trust him? He boasts of his power of persuasion, then tries to persuade readers that the real criminals were John Markoff (who wrote a book villifying him) and Shimomura (who helped the FBI track him down).

He also claims that when he hacked the LA bus ticketing system as a youth, he didn't know it was wrong. I don't believe that for a second. People _do_ know right from wrong. This is further reason for me to distrust Mitnick.

Is Mitnick to be trusted?

Posted Jan 17, 2003 18:58 UTC (Fri) by socket (guest, #43) [Link]

I don't know. Mitnick is certainly dangerous.

But the question is in what context you trust him. I wouldn't trust him with my passwords. I probably wouldn't trust his autobiography to be unbiased - I think autobiographies have a nature of being biased, because it's a very soapboxy mode of communication.

I flipped through the first section of his book a couple weeks ago, and am quite impressed with it overall. I thoroughly agree with the idea that security isn't just a question of encryption algorithms or firewalls - anytime people are involved in a secure system, the people will probably be the weakest point of security. I *do* trust Mitnick to point out the mechanisms of deceptions people can use to completely subvert computational means of security.

So I trust Mitnick to know how to mess with people. I can trust his book to describe at least some of the major factors of deception. But I probably wouldn't trust him in other contexts. It's not being very informative to say that you don't trust a person generally - sometimes you can trust that a person is inconsistent, and until they become reliable, you form a trust in that unreliability.