Review: The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick

The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I picked up and read this book back in 2000 and it had a huge impact on my life. I work in cyber security. Usually I'm just a senior developer making sure that things are secure. At the time when I read this book I was a senior engineer working in Telecommunications (long distance) with Sprint in large-scale customer billing by analyzing their call record data.

Of course much of what Kevin did was as much Phreaking as it was hacking. The use of blue phones and phone manuals to gain access to networks was technical, but also social. As soon as he gained access it was what he did with the access that qualifies as Phreaking.

I was just remembering I had a copy of this book while talking to a friend about the new threats caused by Neural Networks to social trust systems. Essentially little has changed about public trust in the past 20 years. Mitnick was (and given his current professional career still is) as much a trust exploiter as a hacker. I don't think I noticed a single time when he actually used cryptography for an exploit.

In today's society, with AI right around the corner and con artists running everything from the White House to the local coffee shop; this book should see a resurgence in popularity. I'll do what I can.

This book is very well written. It's a biography first and foremost. A lesson on how government institutions work when you make them look like fools. A reminder that we are only as free as we can make ourselves. A reminder that society isn't as smooth and polished on the underside as it seems to be from our glass bubbles.

It is engaging, raw, and a solid book worthy of any bookshelf.

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