10 Questions for Kevin Mitnick (the über hacker)

time ^ | Monday, Aug. 29, 2011 | Belinda Luscombe

[dennisw]

Has social networking changed hacking?

Made it easier. I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access. If I know you love Angry Birds, maybe I would send you an e-mail purporting to be from Angry Birds with a new pro version. Once you download it, I could have complete access to everything on your phone.

How easy was it for those tabloid reporters to hack into celebrities' phones?

This kind of boggles my mind. A lot of the cellular operators would create a default PIN for people's voice mail as 1111 or 1234. It doesn't take a hacker to guess a PIN like that.

What is the perfect PIN then?

The perfect PIN is not four digits and not associated with your life, like an old telephone number. It's something easy for you to remember and hard for other people to guess.

What do you think of people like Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks crowd?

It's more Bradley Manning who was responsible for all of that. Here's an enlisted guy who's able to dump secret documents from SIPRNet to CDs. It is a huge security failure on the part of the U.S. government--the worst that I know of.

Which of your hacks are you most proud of?

I think when I hacked into Pac Bell Cellular to do traffic analysis on the FBI agents who were tasked with capturing me--not for hacking into Pac Bell but for how I leveraged that information to stay one step ahead of the government.

snip

[basil]

Ping!