The prominent hacker Kevin Mitnick, on the other hand, was sentenced to a long prison term, with the judge perhaps slightly overestimating the danger he posed:
Mitnick served five years in prison—four-and-a-half years’ pre-trial and eight months in solitary confinement, because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to “start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone”,[36] implying that law enforcement told the judge that he could somehow dial into the NORAD modem via a payphone from prison and communicate with the modem by whistling to launch nuclear missiles.[37]
I feel like the only reasonable response to that would be for his lawyers to claim that the prosecution had just admitted to apocalyptic incompetence.
Ignore the whistling, why tf would nukes be controllable by any system so insecure as to be reachable from a payphone, let alone with security simplistic enough to be reachable by a such a small input that it could be simulated by whitlstles.
Always makes me laugh reading about the things they thought Mitnick could do. I wonder if they thought Captain Crunch could whistle and make your brain leak out your skull at 2600 hz.
Earlier this week I found a vibe coded web calculator, that allowed code injection. I thought this would be interesting, finding out which functions would be callable and how to exfiltrate data in a plot.
Then I realized the input was evaled and the you could get back text by throwing an exception. Where is the fun in that?
The biggest challenges where that everything got converted to lowercase and the json encoding was a bit broken so I had to do some f-string manipulation.
The prominent hacker Kevin Mitnick, on the other hand, was sentenced to a long prison term, with the judge perhaps slightly overestimating the danger he posed:
Source
I feel like the only reasonable response to that would be for his lawyers to claim that the prosecution had just admitted to apocalyptic incompetence. Ignore the whistling, why tf would nukes be controllable by any system so insecure as to be reachable from a payphone, let alone with security simplistic enough to be reachable by a such a small input that it could be simulated by whitlstles.
Always makes me laugh reading about the things they thought Mitnick could do. I wonder if they thought Captain Crunch could whistle and make your brain leak out your skull at 2600 hz.
I will not stand for the blatant disrespecting of Captain Crunch. He could easily whistle you brain to goo and so much more!
i am sad my “free kevin” shirt did not last.
Hackers at that time were respected and feared. That title meant something, and was earned.
We were few, because everything had to be done by hand, and the knowledge to do so came from experiments, experience, and obscure community.
Then those lazy script kiddies arrived along and ruined that.
Earlier this week I found a vibe coded web calculator, that allowed code injection. I thought this would be interesting, finding out which functions would be callable and how to exfiltrate data in a plot.
Then I realized the input was evaled and the you could get back text by throwing an exception. Where is the fun in that?
The biggest challenges where that everything got converted to lowercase and the json encoding was a bit broken so I had to do some f-string manipulation.