Dell last week hosted the Executive IT Summit for its customers and the keynote speaker on the final day was the world’s most famous computer hacker, Kevin Mitnick.
I had the opportunity to talk to Kevin a little about his background, his run-ins with the law, what he’s doing now and some cautions he has for digital nomads.
(Kevin’s got a pretty cool business card that can also be used to pick locks. They are available for purchase here, but you have to be willing to give up your IP address and security password to get it. 
)
For those of you who were either asleep in the mid-90s or are under the age of 25, Kevin was arrested in 1995 and spent several years on the run under multiple aliases. Kevin now admits that he spent much of his childhood and adolescent years illegally hacking into corporations’ networks, not for personal gain or profit but because of his intellectual curiosity of how things worked.
He now spends his time doing what he calls ‘ethical hacking’, working with many of the companies that were previously his adversaries. These corporations call on Kevin to perform ‘pen tests’ or identifying external weaknesses in their security systems. And while he can easily hack into a network, he tells me the preference for many hackers today is to use social engineering, essentially just calling someone and asking them to send you the information you’re looking for. Does it work, I asked him? His response, “99 percent of the time.” You can have the most robust security infrastructure but as he said in his talk, “There is no Windows update for stupidity.”
If you’d like to read more about Kevin, there’s some interesting information about Kevin in Wikipedia, but also in this excerpt from Takedown, the book written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura, as well in this interview on 60 Minutes.
Kevin has already published numerous books including The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion, but later this year will release an autobiography in which he’ll talk about his upbringing and life as a hacker.
If you’d like to see a more in-depth interview with Kevin on security issues that go beyond just the mobile space, click here to see more of my interview with him.
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