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Kevin Mitnick has died

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Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#531

Post by loup-vaillant »

detourdog wrote: post #450
ChuckMcM wrote: post #193

I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer. I didn't know Kevin, but am friends with Tsutomu Shimomura who worked with authorities to get him arrested. Tsutomu worked with me a bit when I was at Sun trying to get a cryptographically secure subsystem into the base system specification. It was fun to listen to his side of this story. The 80's was a really weird time for computer enth…

The hacks had to be flamboyant. If the hacks weren’t embarrassing the “adults” in suits would deny the hairy person in a t-shirt knew what they were talking about.

This even happens when there is not nearly as much status difference between the two.

I was once tasked to work with TPM 2.0 provisioning in an embedded position. They specifically chose me and pulled me from another team because of my skills in cryptography (I wrote Monocypher). Fast forward a couple weeks, I notice that the way the provisioning was specified, it would allow us to provision a fake TPM without noticing. My team lead didn’t believe me.

Sometimes later we had an actual provisioning procedure in place, and what do you know, it worked to completion even with a fake (software) TPM and a real certificate from the manufacturer. Because, well… we just didn’t compare the relevant public keys. My team lead was still sceptical.

I had to mention the issue in a meeting with some higher-ups and the security guy to be allowed to fix the problem. I believe this goes a bit deeper than a status game. I think it’s downright magical thinking: this hope that ignoring problems (especially vague threats like security vulnerabilities), could make the problem actually disappear.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#532

Post by breezeTrowel »

OJFord wrote: post #488
alex-moon wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the stories in his books are like this. An existing seemingly sensible system is used in a creative way to get access. Every time you read one the creative solution is so elegant you just go "Ah, can't believe I didn't think of that" (and then go try it yourself obviously - had lots of fun as a teenager taking down websites/stealing ppl's passwords/etc as a party trick for my friends).

Seemingly sensible? This one? > the authentication mechanism was reading out your own account number in your voice That's the most suspect part of it to me - even vulnerability to malicious attack like this aside, who would think that's a good idea or going to work well? What percentage of people could successfully use a voice assistant to make a note of their bank account number the first time? Nevermind have it det…

Yes, I think this is pretty stupid too.

Ahem.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/sep/22/voice-recognit...

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#533

Post by nemo44x »

mcv wrote: post #415
ChuckMcM wrote: post #193

I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer. I didn't know Kevin, but am friends with Tsutomu Shimomura who worked with authorities to get him arrested. Tsutomu worked with me a bit when I was at Sun trying to get a cryptographically secure subsystem into the base system specification. It was fun to listen to his side of this story. The 80's was a really weird time for computer enth…

> I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer. It was pancreatic cancer, which is the deadliest cancer. It kills very quickly and as far as I know, it's impossible to cure. It killed my mom: 3 months between diagnosis and death. She didn't want treatment because it couldn't save her; it would only postpone the inevitable and she didn't want to spend the rest of her days in hospitals…

A friend of mine who is a surgeon originally was learning to become a pancreatic cancer surgeon. She changed to GI because the mortality rate was just so high and so fast that it was extremely heartbreaking and depressing.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#534

Post by detourdog »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #531
detourdog wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hacks had to be flamboyant. If the hacks weren’t embarrassing the “adults” in suits would deny the hairy person in a t-shirt knew what they were talking about.

This even happens when there is not nearly as much status difference between the two. I was once tasked to work with TPM 2.0 provisioning in an embedded position. They specifically chose me and pulled me from another team because of my skills in cryptography (I wrote Monocypher). Fast forward a couple weeks, I notice that the way the provisioning was specified, it would allow us to provision a fake TPM without notici…

Definitely some of that. but in Kevin's day it was most likely a team of IBM blue suits, white shirts, and red ties vs. Kevin in whatever he found to wear.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#536

Post by felixhammerl »

defrost wrote: post #490
TheBigSalad wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time a big hack makes the news it turns out that either some system had no security, they used social engineering, or a disgruntled former employee. Hackers aren't sitting there with a super computer in a Guy Fawkes mask trying to decrypt data. The scams are the same now as back then.

Two of the most recent most high profile hacks required a large degree of preplanning, scoping out, custom coding etc to achieve the breadth and depth of penetration gained upon execution. How would you classify supply-chain attacks? Primary security was bypassed by breaking secondary security .. so there was security to be overcome, there was no social engineering aside from understanding procedures in play, and no…

let me blow your mind with "the lazarus heist" podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#537

Post by brandon272 »

samstave wrote: post #511
puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that it really depends on the type of the pancreatic cancer. While pancreatic adenocarcinomas are some of the worst cancers out there (overall 5y survival of 8%), others like pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours have a fairly good prognosis. Famously, Steve Jobs sought alternative medicine solutions to the latter, which was probably misguided.

I come from a long line of clinical/medical folks in my family - and me on the tech side of medicine... That said the following is me talking out my ass, but I have followed a very few number of pancreatic cases - jobs being one... and there is one anecdotal that I would hope people closer to such cases can chime into ; how much wine did these people drink (jobs was a prolific wine drinker) Im wondering if sulfates f…

Anything that I have read about Jobs was that he rarely drank alcohol.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#538

Post by ntietz »

sbilstein wrote: post #512
josh2600 wrote: post #48

Mitnick was a hacker hero of mine in my youth. I think I’ve understood his role as jester prior to conviction less as I’ve grown older, but there’s something about the boyhood charm of being so divorced from the potential consequences of one’s actions that is almost unique. Mitnick had so many stories that entranced the people around him. I heard one second hand of Mitnick dealing with a bank who had early voice veri…

As a kid I ate this stuff up. In the eighth grade, I defaced my middle school website. The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days. She pulled me out of class, told me such in the hallway, let me return to class where I held in tears until the end of the day. Nothing happened and the school year ended a few weeks later. Towards the end of the summer I r…

I had a similar thing happen. I distributed some malware I wrote on the shared drive and had some people run it (it was extremely basic, just locked people out of the computer with no recovery by taking advantage of how locked down they were; but people lost a lot of work). My programming teacher, who was already dealing with me being a distraction in class, went to bat for me so I didn’t get strongly punished but made me clean it off the drive continuously; other students kept putting it back, so I had to monitor for it.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#539

Post by kjs3 »

mcv wrote: post #415
ChuckMcM wrote: post #193

I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer. I didn't know Kevin, but am friends with Tsutomu Shimomura who worked with authorities to get him arrested. Tsutomu worked with me a bit when I was at Sun trying to get a cryptographically secure subsystem into the base system specification. It was fun to listen to his side of this story. The 80's was a really weird time for computer enth…

> I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer. It was pancreatic cancer, which is the deadliest cancer. It kills very quickly and as far as I know, it's impossible to cure. It killed my mom: 3 months between diagnosis and death. She didn't want treatment because it couldn't save her; it would only postpone the inevitable and she didn't want to spend the rest of her days in hospitals…

There is some reason to hope, tho regrettably too late for your family:

https://www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrna-vaccines-fight-pancreati...

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#540

Post by megraf »

I snuck into a banking conference in Miami Florida to meet Kevin. I forged my badge, using the previous years design as inspiration. I got in, and met him, and gave him my badge.

He said "that's really cool" and signed a copy of Ghost in the Wires for me.

Really incredible guy. Rest in peace my friend.

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