Hacker: Kevin David Mitnick

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Kevin David Mitnick was born in Los Angeles on august 6, 1963 and he attended James Monroe high school in L.A. He was a hacker, phreaker and social engineer, who was the world’s most wanted computer criminal in 90’s, He was charged for many criminal activities forfraud and computer hacking into many top companies and stealing their confidential data. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrested Kevin Mitnick on February 15, 1995. He spent nearly five years in a federal prison for the charges. He is now a computer security consultant, author, and an ethical hacker, who started a computer security company called “Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC” and getting paid by the companies for ethical hacking. He was first convicted at the age of 17, he and his two friends physically broke into Pacific Bell's COSMOS phone centre in Los Angeles in 1981, and stole passwords, including the passwords to the door locks at Pacific Bell central offices and some operating manuals for the COSMOS system. One of the gang member’s girlfriend leaked the information to the police, soon Kevin and his friends were arrested and he was sent to the Los Angeles Juvenile Detention Centre for three months, and was under one year probation. In 1983 he wasagain arrested for breaking into Pentagon computer over ARPANET at the University of Southern California from a computer in campus terminal room and he was send to prison to six months at California Youth Authority’s Karl Holton Training School, a juvenile prison. During 1987, he was charged of stealing software fromthe Santa Cruz Operation software company for which he was under probation for 36 months,Kevin’s fourth arrest was in 1987 and 1988 for attacking the Digital Equipment's Palo Alto research laboratory... ... middle of paper ... ...er decrypts using his private key causing a lot of damage to everyone involved. This is why there are two types of signatures used, the non-exportable signature is used among the friends or known persons which is reliable to some extent but when before you sign a exportable signature on someone’s public key you should meet him before in person and exchange photographs and examine his public key and verify that is his genuine key and confirm everything is ok and then only you sign some ones public key with exportable signature otherwise it’s a great risk to do it. This the problem faced in pgp where anyone can place a public key in the global server using some other guy’s name which causes some difficulties for some people to identify the right person if he doesn’t follow the procedures and falls into the hackers trap. This can be avoided by using the signatures.

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