Hacker Kevin Mitnick (59) has died

Hacker Kevin Mitnick has died. Mitnick rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s when he was arrested for several high-profile hacks on companies. After his prison sentence, he was released in 2000 and became an information officer and speaker.

Kevin Mitnick’s death was announced by a funeral home in Las Vegas, the city where he lived, and by a spokesperson for KnowBe4, the security company with which he was involved as a speaker and trainer. Kevin Mitnick was 59 years old and died of pancreatic cancer.

Mitnick was best known by his nickname as ‘the most wanted hacker of all time’. He became known in the 1980s and especially the 1990s when he stole source code from software from American companies as a digital burglar. He did this mainly through technologies such as ‘phreaking’, hacking telephone networks by imitating dial-up sounds. Mitnick managed to break into agencies such as the Pentagon, the NSA and Norad, but also companies such as Compaq and Dell. The hacks were often striking and controversial, although this was partly due to the qualification given to them by the Ministry of Justice. For example, the plaintiff claimed in the lawsuit that Mitnick “could cause a nuclear war by whispering into a telephone” and he was classified as “life-threatening.”

He was arrested several times, but in 1995 he was no longer sentenced to prison. Mitnick was then arrested, after a two-year manhunt by the FBI, and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. In 1999, he also pleaded guilty to several hacks, for which he received more than four years in prison. He was released in January 2000, with the condition that he no longer use technological devices. Later, Mitnick started working as a public speaker, wrote a book and set up security company KnowBe4. There he provided security training, although in recent years he was best known as the public face of the company.