Kevin Mitnick on ’Ghost in the Wires’ and the Rise of the Hacktivists - The Daily Beast
The Godfather of Hacking
►http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/19/kevin-mitnick-on-ghost-in-the-wires-and-the-rise-of-the-hacktivists.h
The 48-year-old security consultant, once known to America as the world’s most notorious computer hacker, has finally returned home to Las Vegas after a three-week vacation in Spain—his first in 11 years—and there’s no time to reboot.
He was eventually sentenced to 46 months in prison—a portion of which was served in solitary confinement a result of the government’s overblown fears that he could whistle nuclear-missile launch codes into a phone—and ordered to pay thousands of dollars as reparation.
In recent months, hackers have been making headlines around the world. Groups like Anonymous, which burst onto the scene by famously taking down banks and online services that refused to do business with WikiLeaks last fall, followed soon thereafter by LulzSec, which spent the early summer months on a rampage hacking the systems at Sony, AT&T, and the CIA. From behind faceless avatars from unknown locales, they taunt their targets, the media, and the feds.
The only difference between Mitnick and the current generation, he explains, are the motives.
“I was never after the media attention when I was doing hacking. I didn’t want to be detected, to be honest with you, being caught,” he admits. “When I was in my juvenile years I never spoke to the media about it. These guys are loving the media attention, they have a completely different driver, and I don’t think it’s curiosity or intellectual challenge. I think it’s media attention, and the love, for a better word, to fuck with people. ”