Kevin Mitnick - the world’s first famous “hacker” - has died at age 59 after succumbing to pancreatic cancer.
Mitnick gained fame for his hacking skills and eventual arrest on hacking and wire fraud charges. After his release from prison, he went on to release various books and speak at conferences on the topic of cyber security/hacking. He is the founder of “Mitnick Security Consulting” which provides cyber consulting and penetration testing services.
Kevin’s influence on the world of cyber security is undeniable, as is his almost legendary reputation in the field.
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This legendary excerpt from his Wikipedia:
Mitnick served five years in prison—four-and-a-half years’ pre-trial and eight months in solitary confinement—because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to “start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone”, implying that law enforcement told the judge that he could somehow dial into the NORAD modem via a payphone from prison and communicate with the modem by whistling to launch nuclear missiles.
Yeah he talks about it in his book which is a fascinating read due to all the anecdotal stories he injects. Highly recommend!
What a time to be a hacker tho, back in those times when cops didn’t even know what a computer was lol.
RIP
EDIT: The book is The Art of Deception: https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/bestselling-books-by-kevin-mitnick
Yeah he talks about it in his book which is a fascinating read due to all the anecdotal stories he injects. Highly recommend!
Which book? He’s written a few going by his Wiki.
EDIT: I’m guessing you meant Ghost in the Wires.
Probably based on the Cap’n Crunch whistle pay phone hack.
Someone correct me if I’ve missed a few bits, but here’s the story…
First, a little history.
Payphones were common. If you’re younger, you’ve probably seen them in movies. To operate them, you picked up the handset, listened for the dial tone (to make sure no one yanked the cord loose), inserted the amount shown by the coin slot, and then dialed. You have a limited amount of time before an automatic message would ask you to add more money. If you dialed a long distance number, a message would play telling you how much more you needed to insert.
There were no digital controls to this - no modern networking. The primitive “computers” were more like equipment you’d see in a science class. So, to deal with the transaction details, the coin slot mechanism would detect the type of coin inserted, mute the microphone on the handset, and transmit a series of tones. Just voltage spikes. The muting prevented the background noise from interfering with the signal detection. Drop a quarter in the slot and you’d hear the background noise suddenly disappear followed by some tapping sounds (this was just bleed through).
It’s also relevant to know that cereals used to include a cheap, little toy inside. At one point, Cap’n Crunch had a whistle which had a pitch of 2600Hz.
The story goes that someone* figured out that the tones sent by the payphones were at 2600Hz - same as the whistle. You could pick up a payphone handset and puff into the whistle a certain number of times, and ti would be detected as control signals (inserting money).
That’s right! Free phone calls to anywhere. I’m hazy on the specifics, but I’m pretty sure there were other tricks you could do, like directly calling restricted technician numbers, too. The reason the 2600Hz tone was special had to do with something like it was used as a general signal that didn’t trigger billing.
It knocked the idea of phone hacking, or “phreaking”, from a little known quirk, to an entire movement. Some of the stuff was wild and if you’re interested, look up the different “boxes” that people distributed blueprints for. Eventually, the phone companies caught on and started making it harder to get at wires and more sophisticated coin receptacles.
If you’ve ever seen the magazine 2600 back in the 90s and early 00s, that’s the origin of the name.
All that is to say, if you knew nothing about technology and watched a guy whistle into a phone to get special access, you’d probably be freaked out. Who knows what that maniac could do with a flute!
- I could have sworn it was Mitnick, but might have been someone else.
It wasn’t Mitnick, it was a hacker/phreaker who, rather unsurprisingly, called himself Captain Crunch.
Edit: There was also Joybubbles/Whistler, who had perfect pitch, so he could whistle the correct tones. He was also blind, so it’s a pretty interesting way to overcome a disability.
Ah, yes, you’re right! Thanks for that.
It reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/dTos3CsvnLQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/FG1AQcGGSec
https://piped.video/FG1AQcGGSec
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
Opens mouth. Proceeds to make this noise: https://youtu.be/iHW1ho8L7V8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/iHW1ho8L7V8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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P.S. Nice username
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i miss techtv every single day. found a trove of old screen savers episodes i put in a youtube playlist that i sometimes watch to scratch the itch. what a magical time to be alive
This is beautiful.
I read tons TXTs in the 90s that sparked an interest in how-things-work and eventually lead to a career in software. People like him really change lives.
May he RIP
He passed away so young!
I remember watching an episode of the screensavers where he was allowed to access the internet again.
man.
https://youtu.be/rcWByfwkf4k?t=894 first learned about the dude way back when i was in high school via his interview with kevin rose, way before youtube was really a thing, proceeded to read the art of deception and the art of intrusion and just like. a lot of that and the other videos this was a part of got me started in all the things i do with computers now. this is gonna sting for a while i think
Thanks for sharing that. It was good to watch the interview again and also be transported to a very nostalgic place, I haven’t seen or thought of The Broken in a long time.
I loved his book Ghost in the Wires. Read it after he appeared on The Colbert Report years ago.
First learned of him from the Chatterbox radio station in GTA3, of all places. FREE KEVIN!!
Fuck cancer
I don’t even remember what exactly I learned from him, but he was 100% a huge influence back in my edgy teen hackerman days in the 00s.
I loved my bluebox and pinkbox back in the day. Search for it now and Etsy gifts are top of the search. lol
smh
That’s fucking tragic. Makes me want to whip out the ole Hacker Manifesto.
Kids will never again know the fun of dealing with long distance calling plans and the barely usable international calling that used to cost half you rent for a 15 minute conversation.
His first hack was Tsutomu Shimomura!
Literally just passively watched his training video for work.
I had a boss one time who had one of his lock pick business cards.
Then someone ruined the business card because they needed to get into a locked file cabinet.
