Kevin Mitnick, a renowned hacker, and computer security consultant died on July 16th of 2023 because of pancreatic cancer. The hacker who was convicted in sensational cases for 5 times in 90s is now no more and left behind a wife and an unborn child.
Starting his career at 16, Mitnick first hacked into the Digital Equipment Corporation’s Computer in 1979 followed by the voicemail service at Pacific Bell. After convicted and serving for a couple of years, he was later released under strict supervision of law enforcement agencies.
Later after sinking deep into various digital crimes and experiencing arrests, convictions, and incarceration the young lad turned into a white hat hacker in 20th century and served as a security awareness training lead for KnowBe4 and then served as a member of Zimperium security advisory board.
Parallelly, Mitnick also served as a paid consultant in cybersecurity and authored many books related to the computer sciences. He was a gem in performing network penetrations and taught social engineering class to many officers serving government agencies.
After he planned to settle down in Las Vegas, Nevada, the hacker started Mitnick Security Consulting LLC to raise security awareness among corporate company employees. He also offered consulting for ransomware related queries and assisted about 19 business firms in wisely mitigating risks associated with the double extortion filled file encrypting attacks.
NOTE – In December 1997, some media resources reported that search engine Yahoo! website was hacked and was infected with the worm that could permanently disrupt the operations of the search engine to the core. The only demand was to release convicted Mitnick from Jail. After conducting a thorough investigation, Yahoo! released a media update that the threat was a hoax and the worm was non- existing.
