Many hackers use their nefarious skills for personal gains. Stealing credit card numbers, passwords, and email addresses. While other do what they do because they have an insatiable curiosity to learn how things work. Kevin Mitnick was arrested in 1995 as the most wanted computer hacker in America. The press led people to believe that he could start a nuclear war by simply whistling into a telephone. What he was actually guilty of was compromising computer systems, telephone networks and databases, as well as eluding the FBI for the better part of two years. Despite having access to millions of personal records and credit card numbers he never stole any money or identities. In fact everything he did he did simply for the fun of it. To sate his insatiable curiosity. So if he never did anything malicious to others what did he actually do? Let’s…show more content… You get compliance.” (Gots, Jason)
One of his favorite pranks was to gain access to a telephone switch and then he would change the class of service of one of his fellow Phone Phreakers. When this person would try to place a phone call from home it would tell him that he needed to insert a dime because Kevin made the system believe that this person was calling from a pay phone. (Greene, Thomas C.)
Kevin began hacking while he was in high school. At the time Hackers were not thought of as criminals as they are today. It was more used as a term to describe someone who liked to tinker with hardware and software for the purpose of making their lives easier. They looked for ways to remove unnecessary steps from programs that would cause them to run faster.
In late 1979, a group of fellow hacker types who worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District dared Kevin to hack into The Ark, the computer system at Digital Equipment Corporation used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software.(Greene, Thomas C.) Here is Kevin’s explanation as to how he was able to get into The