Sikkkim TECH

The maverick brat

There are many who have earned fame, amassed wealth and have become immortal in the minds and imagination of millions of people - with their path breaking,
“out of the box” and awe-inspiring contribution to the ever changing world of information technology - all for the good.

But if we were to take the name of somebody who earned similar fame (if not necessarily wealth) for the wrong reasons in the same IT realm,
by being a “brat” amongst the pack – he is Kevin Mitnick;

Once a fugitive on the run; he is now an ambitious owner of a security consulting firm that he runs in his own name, the Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC.

Right from his childhood days in Los Angeles, when he got his first tip for a way to commute free in LA public transport system while studying in the James Monroe High School;
Kevin graduated in his art of deceiving people to obtain vital information on user credentials and modem phone numbers, primarily through social engineering.

Intrusion into Pentagon

In 1983, Kevin achieved his major hack, the Pentagon, while he was just a student at the University of Carolina.
He supposedly one of the machines in the University, a TRS-80 equipped with Zilog 1.77 MHZ processor to gain access into ARPANET,an intranet service which was in use by the Army, large corporations and universities on those days.
Although he didn’t commit any theft or degradation of the file system; Kevin was merely curious and wanted to know how far he could go into the file system of the U.S Department of Defence, as a test to his abilities.

Guile trickster

With his sheer superlative skills Kevin, all through 1990s,

• scrambled through countless phone networks
• Hacked vehemently into several corporate networks
• Computer systems
• Stealing passwords
• Corporate secrets
• Private emails
• Even broke daringly through the U.S national defence warning system,

Earning himself the title of being FBI’s most wanted computer criminals of his time. Kevin sensational hacking into Digital Equipment Corporation’s computer network and the Pacific Bell voice mail computer systems ensured him multiple warrants; but this never put him down and he escaped law to become a fugitive and continued with his passion to break through computer networks even more fervently; concealing his location and identity by cloning cellular phones and having other false identifications.
In late 1999,

he was sentenced to 46 months in prison

a part of which included being put in solitary confinement in a cell as the U.S judiciary felt that he could possibly whistle nuclear-launch codes into a phone.

• He was let out on supervisory release with access initially only to a landline telephone;
• later he fought and won a ruling in his favour to access the Internet.
• Kevin is a different person now altogether – much more mature and mellow
• But still feels that a silent threat lies quietly in our pockets and purses
• In the form of smart phones that invariably contain valuable yet unprotected proprietary information
• Very much like the unprotected computer systems of 1980s that he hacked through....

Enterprising Entrepreneur

Today, all is forgotten about his past. Mitnick Security Consulting does exactly what he was famous for – hacking, but with authorization. Corporations now pay Kevin for ethical hacking into their computer systems and networks and report on vulnerabilities...