In previous blogs I’ve mentioned my affinity for reading books about hacking and hacking related escapades. One of my more recent favorites of the bunch was definitely Kevin Mitnick’s Ghost In The Wires.
Kevin is a great story teller and is able to easily capture the suspense of the moment in a captivating and colorful way. The whole book pulls you in and quickly becomes a page turner that’s hard to put down. Starting from the shenanigans he got into as a kid phone phreaking just to get a free call, Kevin documents his progression to a criminal on the lamb all due to his increasingly sophisticated attacks on large companies and government agencies. His close-calls with the law all the way up to getting busted by the FBI and eventually, consulting and working for them are so interesting I found myself doing research on them to see if they were real.
One interesting thing about the book I didn’t realize going into it was that the term hacker wasn’t always what we consider to be a hacker now-days. Well Kevin was writing programs to take advantage of systems, the large majority of his hacks were accomplished by “social engineering”. He would pose as someone else in order to gain access to his target and then perform his attack be it phone manipulation or some other form. From my research, it seems like this method of “hacking” was a predecessor to its current form. I found this highly entertaining with one of my favorite episodes being when he was in prison and still able to phone phreak. I won’t give any spoilers, but I will say that this book is highly recommended!
