A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison

I worked at a company that had hired Mitnick as a security consultant.

His report for a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection at the time was largely movie plot physical security stuff. Not wrong exactly, but not the center mass of the threat model they needed either.

He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent. Counterproductive at best. It seemed like his PR exceeded his utility by a great deal.

That trend continues beyond the grave, maybe.

I'm old enough to remember all the "Free Kevin" gifs scattered around the internet.

This helps to fill in some of the details. It's a really nice story showing the humanity that can be found in situations when you look close.

I read the book by Tsutomu Shimomura, who caught Mitnick's hacking and tracked him down. It's a fascinating read. He was able to locate Mitnick in physical world based on his online activities and his cellular phone usage. In those early days, few people understood the cyber landscape and cellular technologies to exploit them.

Hah, he social engineered the God of social engineering...

I heard he can launch nukes by whistling into a pay phone.

Too bad he wasn't colorblind.

I don’t need to know an iota of his activities as a hacker to hate him. I hate him because of how many times I had to be put through mind numbing security training with his mug as the opener. “I’m Kevin Mitnick” and KnowBe4 are seared into my brain at a ptsd level for terminal boredom.