Kevin Mitnick is dead. “Condor” became famous for attacks on the servers of large corporations

This information was also confirmed by Katy Wattman, a spokeswoman for KnowBe4, a cybersecurity company where Mitnick himself worked.

Although for the generation of today’s 20 and 30-year-olds Kevin Mitnick may be an almost anonymous figure, but in the 1990s the American was on the lips of the whole world. He became famous for a series of hacker attacks on the servers of the largest technological corporations in the world, such as Motorola, IBM, Nokia and Pacific Bell.

An adventure with hacking, or rather with social engineering, because it was in this field that Mitnick specialized, he started when he was 13 years old. Then he found a way to get free public transport. He did this by getting the bus driver to tell him where he could buy a validator. He purchased the device for $15, then went to the bus depot, where he found several blocks of unused tickets in a trash can.

Kevin Mitnick is dead. The Darkside Hacker has died at the age of 59

Mitnick’s hacking exploits quickly drew the attention of the FBI. For a long time, however, he remained elusive, changing his identity several times. It finally fell into the hands of federal agents in 1995, thanks to two investigative journalists – John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura.

After his arrest, Mitnick was placed in solitary confinement without access to any electronic devices. He wasn’t even allowed to make a phone call to, as he later joked, “could not initiate a massive nuclear attack from a prison telephone.”

In 1999, Mitnick was sentenced to five years in prison for hacking offenses (time spent in custody was credited towards the sentence). He was released in 2000, but was banned from using the Internet for three more years.

It is worth noting that although as a result of his hacking attacks Mitnick came into possession of thousands of confidential documents that could potentially be worth millions of dollars, he was never proven that he used them for financial gain. Among other things, for this reason, Kevin Mitnick gained a large group of supporters who treated him as a symbol of the fight against the oppressive financial system and soulless corporations.

After being released, “Condor” or “The Darkside Hacker” – as Mitnick was called – decided to go to the “light side” and started working in the cybersecurity industry. He has co-authored three books with journalist William L. Simon on social engineering and social engineering by scammers. He also founded KnowBe4, a company specializing in cybersecurity. He died on July 16, 2023 at the age of 59 due to pancreatic cancer.