Uber-hacker is hacked

Posted on 23 Aug 2006 at 10:59

Uber-hacker Kevin Mitnick had a taste of his own medicine this week when the homepage of his website was defaced by cyber-vandals believed to be operating in Pakistan.

The hackers replaced the page with an offensive message and a defaced picture of Mitnick.

'It is kind of stupid, they do it for the attention,' Mitnick said. 'When I was a hacker, I never stooped to defacing sites because that was more like vandalism, that wasn't any fun.'

The server has now been restored and the site is back online.

Mitnick's notoriety derives from the five-year prison sentence he served in the nineties for breaking into the computer systems of Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia and Sun Microsystems after discovering a large number of vulnerabilities in the OpenVMS operating system by getting access to the Voicemail system of computer company DEC.

He was kept in solitary confinement for eight months, allegedly because his girlfriend Suzy Thunder told authorities that he could cause a nuclear attack by whistling into a phone. After his release he was prohibited from using any technology other than a landline phone until he managed to get the ban overturned in court.

This is not the first time that Mitnick has been the target of hackers. Shortly after he left prison there was an informal competition between hackers. Zone-h 'witnessed a kind of struggle between different defacers who were trying to put their nicknames on Mitnick's homepage and Mitnick's fans who were continuing to replace the defaced page with a copy of the original one, always taking advantage of the same [homepage] misconfiguration'.

Author: Simon Aughton