Essay --

Kevin Mitnick Kevin Mitnick was born in 1963 in Los Angeles California. His parents divorced when he was young so he had a lonely life while his mother worked as a waitress to support them. He was unpopular until he discovered his aptitude for computer programming. His â€Å"career† began as a teenager when he learned to get free bus tickets, then progressed to a telephone phreaker, and ultimately to a notorious and elusive computer hacker. In his teens, he joined a local phone phreak gang who met regularly and planned pranks. As a telephone phreak he was able to overtake a phone a company switch to make personal calls and to eavesdrop on phone calls. In 1981, Mitnick was among a group of telephone phreakers who physically broke into Pacific Bell’s phone center; and they stole operating manuals for the phone company’s mainframe system, lists of computer passwords, and door lock combinations. Luckily for Mitnick, he was just 17 when he was arrested and only sentenced to three months in juvenile detention and one year of probation. In 1983, Mitnick used a computer at the University of Southern California to access ARPanet. ARPanet was the one of the first networks that used packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP and was the predecessor for what we now know as the Internet. Through his ARPanet access he was able to break into the Pentagon. Though he was legally an adult, for this offense, Mitnick received another light sentence of just six months at another juvenile prison. In 1987, Mitnick is again arrested and convicted for stealing software from the Santa Cruz Operation. He was sentenced to three years of probation without any jail time. Perhaps because Mitnick’s punishments were never severe, hi... ...how the combination of social engineering and social networking have made hacking, or in these cases, cracking, easier, â€Å"I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access. If I know you love Angry Birds, maybe I would send you an e-mail purporting to be from Angry Birds with a new pro version. Once you download it, I could have complete access to everything on your phone.† (1) Mitnick’s crime’s may have seemed exceptional at the time, but the evolution of technology and social media since his 1999 conviction has increased the opportunities for more less skilled crackers with malicious intent to cause far more harm than Kevin Mitnick ever did.