This article was taken from the November 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Kevin Mitnick was hacking when the LulzSec kids were in nappies.
His book, Ghost in the Wires, recounts his tenure as the world's most notorious hacker, when he broke into the systems of half a dozen high-profile tech firms. Eventually caught, he served a five-year jail term. We asked the master, now a security consultant, to rate three of today's most-hyped threats.
Lulzsec
Their tactics are fairly standard, Mitnick says, but the mischief-makers who took down cia.gov have "huge balls". The tricky part will be avoiding the law. "They threw me in solitary for almost a year," he says. "Imagine what they'll do to them."
"Now that is a brilliant piece of work," Mitnick says of the "delicious piece of code" that sabotaged Iran's nuclear programme. "I used to think the idea of 'cyber war' was hyped up." Then he saw Stuxnet. "This is kind of the foot in the door."
Anonymous
The group published emails they found on a cyber-security firm's server. Mitnick says the "moderately clever" hack isn't as striking as the habit of the firm's CEO to use one password for everything. "For an information-security company, they really fucked up."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
