I worked at a company that had hired Mitnick as a security consultant.
His report for a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection at the time was largely movie plot physical security stuff. Not wrong exactly, but not the center mass of the threat model they needed either.
He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent. Counterproductive at best. It seemed like his PR exceeded his utility by a great deal.
In all fairness, a genuine attacker WILL be abrasive and abusive. They WILL single out employees that are gullible and exploit them. It's not pretty because a genuine attack is not pretty. Of course a simulated attack will be indecent and discourteous in nature, that is how attacks are.
Dude I was called out by name in the report either right before you got there or the first one you were there. I was called out in the one where they got B's Audi keys in his office.
Whole thing was so dumb. A floor full of smart monitors that they could have put a keylogger on. A plethora of physical network access and I get called out for leaving my laptop on the lock screen and going downstairs for food.
And they got found out because I ran little snitch I paid for myself and it caught their hijacked chrome making all sorts of weird network calls. But I don't remember being given credit for that.
He social engineered your company into contracting him, and that adds to the legend, but people don't see how many other companies he failed to social engineer.
This is what happens when the 90's PC community renamed crackers as hackers. Proper hackers would have been the ITS/WAIS ones doing crazy things with computers for its era.
I have so many stories about his absolutely terrible behavior at conferences. He once refused to pay the entry fee to a charity event and had to be physically ejectedy.
Absolutely better at PR than any actual work, pay careful attention and none of his early stuff was particularly novel, from a technical perspective.
But for whatever reason, we venerate him just because he was victimized by the state. The world is not a dichotomy -- sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
He got all of the "Free Kevin" attention because of how long he was left in jail before trial and then being stuck in solitary confinement after sentencing for months.
If he had been treated fairly by the justice system he wouldn't have gotten nearly as much attention.
He was also autistic, a lot of the behavior can be explained through that lens.
>I'm old enough to remember all the "Free Kevin" gifs scattered around the internet.
A generation of hackers (specifically, the vBulletin generation) stayed as far away from the CFAA as possible after that fiasco, which I suspect is exactly the chilling effect that the DOJ intended.
I read the book by Tsutomu Shimomura, who caught Mitnick's hacking and tracked him down. It's a fascinating read. He was able to locate Mitnick in physical world based on his online activities and his cellular phone usage. In those early days, few people understood the cyber landscape and cellular technologies to exploit them.
I don’t need to know an iota of his activities as a hacker to hate him. I hate him because of how many times I had to be put through mind numbing security training with his mug as the opener. “I’m Kevin Mitnick” and KnowBe4 are seared into my brain at a ptsd level for terminal boredom.
His report for a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection at the time was largely movie plot physical security stuff. Not wrong exactly, but not the center mass of the threat model they needed either.
He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent. Counterproductive at best. It seemed like his PR exceeded his utility by a great deal.
That trend continues beyond the grave, maybe.