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February 17, 2005
Nit-micking
10 years ago, a guy named Kevin Mitnick went to prison because his technique was not quite the best.
Yesterday, he presented at Athenee Hilton Bucharest, during an IDG Roadshow. Mitnick spoke about security and especially about social engineering, maybe one of the few arts which he truly masters. What is social engineering? Basically, the art of making people give out their passwords, or _fooling_ them to give out their passwords if you like. Of course, you also need the right type of subjects for it to work.
One of the less known fact about Mitnick was that he didn't write his own exploits, instead his relied on those written by others, especially those created by the mastermind hacker 'jsz' at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. This is what happened when he tried to do something by himself.
What is interesting is that no matter how reformed Kevin Mitnick tries to look (the tie and all the rest), the press will always call him "the hacker". In this business, drawing a line between security experts and hackers is essential and surprisingly, the press didn't cross it yet. But with all these 'roadshows' where hackers teach you about how to secure your systems from other hackers, it can't be much longer.
Posted by Costin Raiu at February 17, 2005 11:02 AM
Comments
I spoke at the IDC roadshows in Prague and Moscow, immediately after Kevin (I was talking about heuristic malware detection methods). I also spent a fair time talking to him at Sheremetyevo airport :)
He's a nice guy actually. However, on a professional level, I found his presentation rambling, far too anecdotal, and without much real substance on what should be done to prevent the sort of SE attacks he excelled at. Interestingly, while he has often been held up as a "computer hacker" he is really nothing of the sort. His level of technical knowledge seems extremely limited, but he was a "big name" draw to the conferences. :-)
Posted by: AJ at February 17, 2005 11:02 AM
Kevin Mitnick, *the* Kevin Mitnick was in Bucharest!?
Cum a fost la conferinta?
Posted by: Stefan Tanase at February 17, 2005 11:02 AM