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Best known for a bold hacking frenzy in the 1990s that involved the theft of data and credit card numbers, he went on to be a security representative and speaker.
By Alex Traub
Kevin Mitnick, who at the dawn of widespread web use in the mid-1990s became the archetype of the nation’s hacker (obsessive but smart, shy but mischievous and threatening to a dubious degree) and who then used his skills as a “hacking boss” for a cybersecurity firm, he died Sunday in Pittsburgh. He was 59.
Kathy Wattman, a spokeswoman for the cybersecurity company she partly owns, KnowBe4, said the cause is pancreatic cancer.
Described by the New York Times in 1995 as “the country’s most wanted computer outlaw,” Mr. Mitnick was a fugitive for more than two years.
He was wanted for illegally gaining access to some 20,000 credit card numbers, plus some belonging to Silicon Valley moguls; cause millions of dollars in damage to the company’s IT operations; and theft of software used for wireless call privacy and billing information management.
Eventually, he was arrested and spent five years in prison. However, no evidence emerged that Mr. Mitnick used the files he stole for profit. He would later protect his activities as a high-stakes but ultimately innocent game.
“Anyone who loves to play chess knows it’s enough to defeat his opponent,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Ghost in the Wires. “”You don’t want to plunder his kingdom or his possessions to make it worthwhile. “
At the time of Mr. Mitnick’s capture in February 1995, the PC era was still young; Windows 95 has not yet been released. Mitnick’s case sparked a heated verbal exchange abroad not only about piracy, but also about the web itself.
“As a media celebrity, the Internet is now overexposed,” Times columnist Frank Rich complained in March 1995, blaming Rich. Mitnick for the exaggeration.
Mr. Mitnick’s most impressive crimes were his attempts to evade capture through the authorities. In 1993, he dismantled telephone systems in California, allowing him to listen to F. B. I. officials. who pursued him and confused their efforts to locate him.
On some other occasion, a radio scanner and software, Mr. Mitnick discovered that the F. B. I. The agents were closing in on him. He ran away from his apartment and when the government arrived, they discovered there was a box of donuts waiting for them.
Mr. Mitnick got into trouble on Christmas Day 1994, when he stole emails from another hacker named Tsutomu Shimomura and mocked him. Upon learning of the attack, Mr. Shimomura called off a cross-country ski he was participating in and volunteered to help locate Mr. Shimomura. Mitnick.
What the Times called a “duel on the net” ensued. Mitnick, the amoral scientist, praising his opponent’s technical skills, while Mr. Shimomura, the independent armed bandit with a conscience, accuses M. Mitnick of violating the codes of the online community.
“This kind of habit is unacceptable,” he told The Times.
Mr. Shimomura, the software he had designed to reconstruct a user’s computer sessions, as well as cell phone scanning equipment, proceeded to locate Mr. Mitnick.
Mr. Mitnick was eventually caught through the FBI and charged with illegal use of a dial-up device and computer fraud. “He would have had access to trade secrets worth millions of dollars,” Kent Walker, an assistant U. S. attorney in San Francisco, said at the time. “He’s a big threat. “
In 1998, while Mr. Mitnick was awaiting sentencing, an organization of supporters seized the Times’ online page for several hours, forcing it to close. A reporter of the Times generation, John Markoff, also part of the imbroglio, reported some time after the arrest that Mr. Mitnick had access to Mr. Markoff in revenge for Mr. Markoff’s reporting on his activities.
Mr. Mitnick entered into plea agreements in 1996 and 1999, which included pleading guilty to computer and wire fraud. He was released from the crime in 2000 on the condition that he speak from a computer or cell phone for three years without permission from his probation officer.
After his release from prison, Mr. Mitnick read a case of self-defense. “My crimes were undeniable trespasses,” he said. My case is a case of curiosity. “
Kevin David Mitnick was born and raised in the Van Nuys community of Los Angeles on August 6, 1963. His parents, Alan Mitnick and Shelly Jaffee, divorced when he was 3 and he was raised through his mother, a waitress.
Mr. Mitnick was a stocky, lonely boy who, at the age of 12, figured out how to board the bus freely with a $15 punch card and blank tickets he pulled out of a dumpster. In high school, he developed an obsession with the inner workings of corporate telephone switches and circuits.
He showed his willingness to flagrantly violate the law, breaking into a Pacific Bell as a teenager and stealing technical manuals.
In the late 1980s, he was convicted twice of hacking into corporate computer systems, resulting in a criminal conviction and counseling for computer addiction.
However, Mitnick has occasionally used a strangely outdated technique for high-tech theft. He posed as authority figures via phone and email, persuading junior corporate officials to hand over passwords that gave him access to secret information.
Mr. Mitnick’s first marriage, when he was in his early twenties, ended temporarily in divorce. In 2015, he met Kimberly Barry at a cybersecurity convention in Singapore, and the two soon began dating. They married last year, after learning of his cancer diagnosis. She survives him and is pregnant with her first child.
The year Mr. Mitnick launched, the Times reported on an “unusual deal” in which he hired through a California school he had “victimized” to consult on cybersecurity. Mitnick called it “hiring the hacker. “
Now, it’s not unusual for hackers to locate paintings when exposing government and corporate vulnerabilities. KnowBe4, the company owned in part through Mr. Mitnick, describes itself as “the world’s largest provider of security awareness education. “The cybersecurity education program designed through Mr. Mitnick is used in more than 60,000 organizations.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review about the privacy of knowledge, the journalist and Amy Webb met this hacker who was once persecuted in 2017 with an epithet that would have baffled law enforcement and newspaper readers in the 1990s: “Kevin Mitnick, Internet security expert. “
Livia Albeck-Ripka and Orlando Mayorquin contributed to the report.
Alex Traub works in the obituary office and reports on New York City for other sections of the newspaper. More information about Alex Traub
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