311–320 of 666 posts
Sad to see. Pancreatic cancer is one of the scary ones, since there are so few symptoms before you hit stage 4. For those who haven't seen it, Freedom Downtime is a movie by the 2600 gang which is mostly about Mitnick's imprisonment, and the whole Free Kevin movement. (I wonder who wrote the obituary, it's especially wide-ranging, and poetic in parts.)
"FREE KEVIN MITNICK, NOW" https://youtu.be/xkKa-jvh4Ik (@1:55) Does anyone know where this samples comes from?
When Kevin first found out he had Cancer, the doctors gave him "weeks". But you know Kevin -- he refused to accept his fate and found the top doctors in the world, tried experimental procedures and was able to get himself all the way into remission just 11 months later. It was incredibly inspiring, we all thought he had yet again beaten the system. It's tragic how the last 10 weeks played out, he fought all the way u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, social engineering was and still is a major component of infosec, right? He was very good at that segment of the industry ("penetration testing" via social engineering).
Manipulating people is more interesting in some ways than exploiting a bit of badly written software because while I write terrible code all the time, I could fix it too but there's no patching our stupid stupid brains. We can try to be more careful, and avoid falling for things others have already, but the flaws are still there just waiting for the moment our guard is down.
My parents vaguely remembered who Kevin Mitnick was when I gave my father my copy of 'Ghost in the Wires' to read. I told him, this was the 'hacker' of the 80s, read how he managed to 'hack' all these places. My father replied, "I'm pretty sure I won't understand anything he would do". Me, "Just give it a chance, you'll be surprised" When he gave the book back, I asked my father if anything Kevin did my father wouldn…
Would there be a modern version of this? I haven't read it and I'm interested, but mostly my parents are getting old, and with AI on the corner, I fear a bit the next level scams.
I'll go in tomorrow and update our August KnowBe4 training deployment for August to be a couple of his modules. Our users won't know, and I guess he won't either, but cancer sucks and it'll make me happy to do it.
KnowBe4 is the bane of my work existence. It's honestly the worst thing about my job, having to take their courses. It's too bad Mitnick sold out to Scientologists (KnowBe4), but I guess he had to cash in somehow. It kind of upsets me that I'm forced to watch Mitnick's videos about social engineering, considering his own nefarious use of the tricks he's teaching people to avoid. I mean, I guess learn from an expert?…
The man who could whistle the nuclear codes has passed away. And now maybe I can strike the social engineering village before the sun comes up.
To be candid; fuck this narrative. Nobody "Beats" cancer based on sheer will. Same scenario as those that did not "Fight hard enough". It's a disease. It does not care about your wants, and needs.