Ghost in the Wires

Kevin Mitnick was one of the big names in 90's/00's hacking culture. This is his story.

It begins as a plodding biography of a young man who frequently gets into trouble for his pranks and curiosity. There are too many things he wants to know and he will circumvent procedural or technical barriers to find out. He begins to hack compulsively.

As the story continues Kevin gets into progressively more trouble as a result of his hacks. He also suffers betrayals at the hands of friends, hacking partners, rivals, and even a girlfriend. The story begins to take on the character of an espionage thriller as the net closes around him and he succeeds in increasingly more narrow escapes. He is eventually caught and the story enters its falling action from there.

Unfortunately Kevin is obviously a douchebag and it bleeds through in a dozen ways during your listen. Minus one star! But, if anyone has earned the right to be arrogant, maybe it's the guy who evaded the entire FBI so handily for years that they had to break the law to catch him.

Well worth the time if you've heard his name or wondered what all those "Free Kevin!" stickers were about so long ago. Possibly worth the time all on its own.

After reading a book I like to compare my impression to the impressions other people have. For "Ghost in the Wires" there are certainly a lot of negative reviews. I was a bit surprised. Although they are not wrong. I personally wouldn't weight the flaws so strongly.

It is true, in my opinion, and throughout the book occurring, that Mitnick is a bit whiny and some what narcissistic. He constantly praises himself for having met this or that girl. Which does absolutely nothing for the plot and is almost every time a one- or two-liner sentence. And oh god, the step master workout routine. A few chapters in he wines about how his wife could leave him. Although he does nothing to change his way of living and keep out of jail and then rattles on about how he feels betrayed. He constantly wines about his poor mom and gram having to suffer because of his exploits and their consequences but does again nothing to change himself. Somewhere in the book, I think, he mentions his hacking being pathologic. Maybe that could be an explanation, but read for yourself.

That being said. I still think it's an interesting book about social engineering other people and how a justice system could not keep up with the development of computers and the internet. Is the book about hacking? Not so much. There are some random parts thrown in, where he explains a few things. But most of the time it's very vague. To gain access to information and source code he uses not hacking but social engineering people (some reviews say it's con artistry). Then he looks for exploits in the code and uses them. Later on he uses exploits to gain information about exploits other people have found. So it's not so much him hacking to find and use exploits and more of him using exploits from a tool box to gain access to new/more exploits to keep his toolbox up to date. What I'm trying to say is, that is not so much hacking in my opinion. But maybe it's just not the main focus of the book and therefore not explained that well.

My review sounds now a lot more negative than how I felt about the book. It's a good read with it's downs and if you are not that much bothered by some of Mitnick's personality quirks and/or interested into phone phreaking you should read it.

VAX/VMS, SunOS, netcat, ESS5, DMS100. All things I remember from my youth, I was a bit young for some of the phone tricks folks used, but reading about Kevin Mitnick's travels through a similar world was fun and refreshing. He did get the shaft repeatedly in the legal system, and procedures were not followed, but sometimes he sounds a bit whiny. He did break the law, and he knew it, even if it couldn't be proven correctly, he should have been punished.

A lead in to the modern day hackers, a guy who was out to do no more than collect information, just like many geeks do. He needed to know Stuff, just like trivia buffs, or the comic book guy on the simpsons. :)

His running from the law showed some of the holes in the system at the time that he exploited, and left room to think how the new hackers, out with evil intent can exploit holes in our current system to accomplish the misdeeds they are up to.