Kevin Mitnick was once a wanted man, charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, and other techie crimes. He'd been busted before (and once had computer-addiction counseling on judge's orders) but had been pulled into the game again. After running from the FBI, spending several years in jail, and making a clean start, Mitnick is back at it. This time, though, it's what he calls "ethical hacking." He protects the types of companies he used to target from the sort of outlaw geek he used to be.
How did you become interested in hacking?
It actually started with an interest in magic. Then I met a kid in high school whose dad was very knowledgeable about the phone system. He could put in a secret code and call anywhere in the world. He could do all these tricks and it was kind of magical.
Are you the best hacker out there?
Probably the best hackers haven't been caught. A lot of the reason I got caught is I was hacking with people who turned me in. But it doesn't matter
how I got caught, just that I did.
People were pretty scared of you.
A lot of things were exaggerated to make me into a cyber-bogeyman.
The prosecutors would come up with things that were just impossible for me to do, to scare the court and to scare the public—like that I could whistle into the phone and start a nuclear strike.
Do you feel bad about what you did?
I feel bad about violating other people's rights and breaking into systems that I had no permission to break into and causing those companies a lot of heartache. I wish at the time I could have controlled my behavior. Do I feel guilty about hacking in general? No, I do it for a living.
Do you feel insecure?
Could somebody set me up? Yeah, it'd be easy. Am I afraid of it? No, because I know that I'm not doing anything against the law or unethical.
How does the hacker community view you?
It's mixed. You have people who are jealous, view me as a sellout. You have people who just think I know about social [engineering], that I don't know anything technical. And you have people who want autographs and pictures.
How has hacking's image changed?
In high school, one of my first assignments in computer class was to write a program to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program to steal the teacher's password. The teacher gave me an A. Today, you'd probably get expelled. There were not even laws against it when I started, and now it's very taboo.
Tags:
computers,
crimes,
dad,
fbi,
game,
hacking,
heartache,
Kevin Mitnick,
magic,
on the job,
outlaw,
prosecutors,
techie
