

He asked for codes that would allow him access to files he wanted all he had to do was ask for specific terms like “requester code.”

Mitnick started by calling up the DMV and pretending to be an officer. However, security systems weren’t sophisticated enough yet. The 1980s was a great time to exploit the digital world, as digital records were becoming increasingly popular. Big Idea #2: Mitnick began his life as a hacker in the early 1980s, when he was still just a teenager. This strategy worked more often than not and was used before his seventeenth birthday.

Mitnick learned to get information by saying the right things on the phone. If you want to call a company and acquire some specific information, it will help if you use the correct terminology and lingo – words used by everyone else at that company. The first step to accomplishing this is to establish trust with them. This would influence his later escapades, which involved spying on people’s property records by using a book from the Survival Bookstore that showed how to gain access to their information.Īs Kevin got further into the world of hacking, he realized that social engineering is an art of manipulating people into doing what you want. He loved the element of deception and became obsessed with practicing tricks to manipulate the audience. Kevin was a good student and athlete, but he got hooked on magic at ten years old. His mother’s boyfriends were abusive to Kevin and this probably contributed to his rebellious attitude towards authority figures. Kevin never had a lot of friends, because he moved around a lot. They moved around a lot when he was young due to the fact that his mother got into bad relationships and couldn’t hold down a job for very long. He had only one sibling, his mother Shelly Mitnick. Kevin Mitnick was born on August 6, 1963. Big Idea #1: Kevin Mitnick grew up with an interest in magic and manipulation.
