I seem to recall that Mitnick was not nearly as good as he claimed to be--someone said there are IRC transcripts where ol' Mitnick is asking other people to compile and link his exploit code for him, because he didn't know how.
Your smoking dope. Mitnick was damn good, and so were plenty of other people that never got caught, and have good paying legit jobs today.
The vast majority of exploits by Mitnick were 'social engineering', not actual code attacks against servers. He's call up a secretary and pose as a salespuke who needed access for something, and basically bullsh!t a password out of him/her. Social Engineering can be an art form all its own, but it is not really 'hacking' in the negative sense.
"I seem to recall that Mitnick was not nearly as good as he claimed to be--someone said there are IRC transcripts where ol' Mitnick is asking other people to compile and link his exploit code for him, because he didn't know how."
Mitnick's chops may have been good or fair. His real talent was social-engineering. He has the knack for getting on the phone and wheedling information out of unsuspecting folk. He once acquired the tech specs, schematics, and programming codes for the motorola "something-tac" phone by claiming to be a field rep. The hapless secretary/admin type faxed him the documents which enabled him to hack the phone and keep LE off his trail.
That takes some tech skill, but getting those docs was the real hack.
Malicious hackers, and more to the point, virus creators should rot in moldy, nasty prisons!!!
Top sends
I seem to recall that he was a social-hacker. That is, he would shmooze a secretary or front-desk person into getting him access, passwords, etc.
(Kind of like the Matthew Broderick character in War Games. He got himself sent to the principles office, b/c he knew where they wrote down the passwords)
"I seem to recall that Mitnick was not nearly as good as he claimed to be--someone said there are IRC transcripts where ol' Mitnick is asking other people to compile and link his exploit code for him, because he didn't know how."
Yup. He was a pretty decent hacker back in the day... when it came to VAX/VMS. *Not* UNIX.