His report for a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection at the time was largely movie plot physical security stuff. Not wrong exactly, but not the center mass of the threat model they needed either.
He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent. Counterproductive at best. It seemed like his PR exceeded his utility by a great deal.
That trend continues beyond the grave, maybe.
Whole thing was so dumb. A floor full of smart monitors that they could have put a keylogger on. A plethora of physical network access and I get called out for leaving my laptop on the lock screen and going downstairs for food.
And they got found out because I ran little snitch I paid for myself and it caught their hijacked chrome making all sorts of weird network calls. But I don't remember being given credit for that.
(Sips mojito)
I understand he probably just lent his name to the company (though he did show up in some of the videos), but still...
He did cost people their jobs though, so I guess he's a good person.
They left out convicted criminal.
Absolutely better at PR than any actual work, pay careful attention and none of his early stuff was particularly novel, from a technical perspective.
But for whatever reason, we venerate him just because he was victimized by the state. The world is not a dichotomy -- sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
If he had been treated fairly by the justice system he wouldn't have gotten nearly as much attention.
He was also autistic, a lot of the behavior can be explained through that lens.
This helps to fill in some of the details. It's a really nice story showing the humanity that can be found in situations when you look close.
A generation of hackers (specifically, the vBulletin generation) stayed as far away from the CFAA as possible after that fiasco, which I suspect is exactly the chilling effect that the DOJ intended.
Wait ... no fists involved. My mistake.
It's entirely possible to be on opposite sides of the fence, hate the other party's actions, but still respect (or even like) them on a personal level. Imagine yourself in their shoes & dial it up to 11.
[insert favorite movie scene here]
I recently re-read "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier". It was published in 1991 and the first third of the book provides an early contemporary account of Kevin Mitnick. It's a great book that I first read in my high school library in the 90s and it completely captured my imagination.
However, I had never connected the dots that the subject of the last third of the book was Robert Tappan Morris, creator of the Morris worm, who went on to cofound Y Combinator! Paul Graham is also quoted in the book.
The book has aged pretty great. They added an updated epilogue in 1995 in the early part of the Free Kevin era, but honestly re-listening to the book in 2025, I was wondering where the updated Y Combinator epilogue was!
Kevin was particularly annoying because he never failed to penetrate a target. The reason that's annoying is it just takes one slip, one weak point, one inattentive admin and it's over. People will stay mad about that. I get it.
But those who say he had no talent are just ignorant.
His goal was to make the world safer, and making people pay attention to risk didn't make him a lot of friends. All the hate I am reading here is just sad.
If you hate Kevin and did not know Kevin, I feel bad for you. Hate is an expensive emotion, even when you're just being a keyboard warrior. It should be reserved for people who have really wronged you. Kevin is not with us anymore. The hate is hurting you, not him. And he has a son who will read this someday. Have a heart.
I think this was the first time I heard someone being forbidden by court from accessing the internet. At the time we had like two, maybe three kids in class who even used dial up regularly.
Windows 12 was in development back in 1979? I think that timeline is a bit off.
