Kevin mitnick vs tsutomu shimomura biography

American hacker (–)

Kevin David Mitnick (August 6, – July 16, ) was an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile arrest and five years in prison for various computer and communications-related crimes. Mitnick's pursuit, arrest, trial and sentence were all controversial, as were the associated media coverage, books and films. After his release from prison, he ran his own security firm, Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC, and was also involved with other computer security businesses.

Early life and education

Mitnick was born on August 6, , in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California. His father was Alan Mitnick, his mother was Shelly Jaffe, and his maternal grandmother was Reba Vartanian. Mitnick was Jewish, and grew up in Los Angeles, California. At age 12, Mitnick convinced a bus driver to tell him where he could buy his own ticket punch for "a school project", and was

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Takedown: The Persuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw -- By the Man Who Did It

Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff

Hyperion, New York, ISBM $

From the dust jacket:

The capture of the notorious computer outlaw Kevin Mitnick on the evening of February 14, , brought to an end on of the most dramatic and bizarre crime sprees in recent times. Mitnick had become the most wanted hacker in history by stealing millions of dollars worth of information from government, corporate, and university computer systems and had successfully outwitted Federal authorities for more than two years. But on Christmas Day he made a fatal mistake when he launched a raid on the home system of brilliant computer security expert Tsutomom Shimomura--and inadvertantly fired the first volley in a seven week mattle that would be waged across an entire continent--a battle that was ultimately fought for the soul of the Internet.

Takedown is Tsutomo Shimomura's own riviting account of the story that has already become a real-life epic for the Information Age--a classic manhunt that, instead of being carried out on crowded urban streets or backcountry roads, is conducted over telephone wires. Angered by the attach on his computer--which is soon followed by a series of threatening telephone calls and malicious scattering of his personal files throughout the Internet--Shimomura sets ou to learn the identity of his mysterious intruder, armed only with his expertise and an array of high-tech weaponry.

On February 15, the FBI managed to hunt down Kevin Mitnick, considered by the New York Times as "the most wanted hacker in all cyberspace." Mitnick would end up spending five years in prison for various crimes, including eight months in an isolation cell.

Why so much time in isolation? Because someone convinced the judge that he was capable of "initiating a nuclear war by whistling on a public telephone". That decision increased the myth of a hacker who achieved much more for his ability with social engineering than for his technical ability.

A ghost in the wires

Mitnick has written four books to date, although the most biographical of them all is ' A Ghost in the Wires ' (, Captain Swing). It is in this volume of almost pages that the hacker - with the help of the writer William L. Simon - tells his whole story, from when he started in this area until he was arrested by the FBI and then tried and imprisoned.

Mitnick1

Mitnick soon discovered to take advantage of the weaknesses of the systems he used in his day to day. It all started with the bus tickets he used to get around Los Angeles, and that they had a particular way of being bored according to the day, time or route of each bus.

The young Mitnick managed to find out where to buy the machine with which these cards were punched, he got a lot of cards prepared to be punched in a terminal where the drivers left their card books unattended, and that's how he ended up traveling from one place to another. side by side of the city without paying . No one stopped her feet then, as she states in the book:

It seemed ingenious to my mother, it seemed to my father a show of initiative, and the bus drivers who knew that I was stinging my own transshipment tickets seemed a very funny thing to them. It was as if all the people who knew what I was doing were patting me on the back.

The magician of social engineering

Maybe that first adven

Physicist and computer security expert (born )

Tsutomu Shimomura (下村 努, Shimomura Tsutomu, born October 23, ) is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hackerKevin Mitnick. Takedown, his book on the subject with journalistJohn Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in

Shimomura was a founder of semiconductor company Neofocal Systems, and was CEO and CTO until

Biography

Born in Japan, Shimomura is the son of Osamu Shimomura, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended Princeton High School.

At Caltech he studied under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. After Caltech, he went on to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his hands-on education in the position of staff physicist with Brosl Hasslacher and others on subjects such as lattice gas automata.

In , he became a research scientist in computational physics at the University of California, San Diego, and senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Shimomura also became a noted computer security expert, working for the National Security Agency.

In , he testified before Congress on issues regarding the privacy and security (or lack thereof) on cellular telephones. Author Bruce Sterling described his first meeting with Shimomura in the documentary Freedom Downtime:

It was in front of Congress, and I was testifying to a Congressional subcommittee. And here was this guy in sandals and, like, ragged-ass cutoffs, and the rest of us were done up in ties [] giving our best sort of 'yes, we're in front of Congress' thing and Shimomura is there in this surfer gear.

He is best known for events in , when he assisted with tracking down the computer hacker Kevin Mitnick. In that year Shimomura also received prank calls which popularized the phrase "My kung fu is stronger than yours", equating it with hacking. Shim