July 20 (Portaltic/EP) –
Kevin Mitnick, founder of the cybersecurity company KnowBe4 and considered one of the most famous hackers of the 90s, died last Sunday at the age of 59, as reported by The New York Times on Thursday.
The death of this well-known hacker has been confirmed by the spokesperson for the company created by the deceased, who has indicated that his death it was caused by cancer of pancreas that he suffered.
Mitnick, considered one of the most famous cybercriminals of the 1990s, became famous after the theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers of users in the United States.
After accessing different government, corporate and university computer systems using social engineering techniques, researchers renamed him the “world’s most wanted” hacker, as he recalled. The New York Times.
Precisely this newspaper suffered the consequences of the arrest of Mitnick, which took place in 1998, for these actions, because a group of ‘hackers’ attacked the website of this newspaper for several hours as a show of support.
He pleaded guilty to computer fraud and was sentenced to 46 months in prison, however, in his memoirs ‘Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker’ he disputed many of the accusations made against him.
In a meeting that took place more than a decade ago in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the convicted man acknowledged that what he did “was immoral, wrong, and negatively affected many companies.”
After serving five years in prison for different computer crimes, the cybercriminal reformed and became a computer security consultant, founding his own company dedicated to this area, Mitnick Security Consulting.
