Reformed Hacker Looks Back

There was a time when the name Kevin Mitnick represented everything that the world's chief security officers feared most: a reckless geek with the power to break any network in the world. In the mid 1990s, Mitnick became the world's poster boy for the "hacker threat" when he was identified as the guy sneaking into and stealing code from networks including those belonging to Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: Prosecutors and journalists, including the New York Times' John Markoff, further aggrandized his cybercrime exploits, claiming he was a criminal hacker mastermind who had wiretapped the FBI to stay ahead of his pursuers, hacked into Pentagon computers and could launch nuclear weapons simply by whistling tones into a pay phone. Mitnick wound up serving five years in prison--four before his conviction and eight months in solitary... [read full story]