“The incredible story of Kevin Mitnick, hacker extraordinaire.
A truly fascinating book, both in the narrative and the technical details, Mitnick will have a lot of people rethinking what hacking is, what it means, and why people do it.
On the hacking side, there is a lot of techie stuff in here that might be tough for some to follow, although having only a cursory knowledge of information systems is more than enough to help readers understand WHAT Mitnick was doing, even if you might not understand exactly HOW he did it.
On the narrative side, I was pleasantly surprised as the story evolved from one of technical curiosity to a fugitive story complete with a helicopter chase.
Combining the two sides is the curious fact and often humorous descriptions of Mitnick’s social engineering ploys.
One of my favorites (recreated here based on my shoddy memory):
Mitnick calls a telecom office pretending to be one of their salesmen. “Yeah, I’m out here in the field and I lost my database password. I was hoping I could get that from you, I have some clients I need to meet with and I need to show them the new software.”
The guy at the office says, “I can get you the password, but I can’t give it out over the phone.”
Mitnick says, “Hmm…I might not be in until later tonight or tomorrow. Tell you what, can you print it out for me and seal it in an envelope? Just leave it with Peggy [Peggy being the name of a secretary Mitnick got from some earlier calls] and I’ll get it from her.”
The worker sees no problem with that, and 20 minutes later Mitnick calls Peggy posing as the salesman, asks if she has an envelope for him, and asks her to open it and read him the contents.
The book is full of entertaining vignettes like this one. And if a good book is supposed to change your life, this one succeeded. I spent Saturday looking at shredders.
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