Both Kevin Mitnick (http://www.defensivethinking.com ) and Kevin Poulsen (http://www.securityfocus.com & http://www.wired.com ) are currently successful in the Information Security field because of their past computer crimes [1] and the attention that they received through the news media. They are not the only ones though!

Their professional success that followed after serving jail time, created a trend that young “wannabe hackers” follow: They expect a bright future career and in order to achieve that, they hope to get busted for hacking.

Obviously there are better ways to establish themselves in the InfoSec field but they attempt to approach professional success with a wrong way. I believe that people shouldn’t generalize from such examples because these examples do not necessarily lead to the fame that Mitnick and Poulsen received, as such it is a hasty generalization from too few cases.

Whenever I ask people if they know Mitnick, they answer: Ah! The famous hacker! Not many people know though that Mitnick’s security company’s website was defaced recently: http://www.zone-h.org/content/view/14073/31/. These defacements indicate the existence of a cyber-war between Black-hat (unethical) and White-hat (ethical) hackers.

Visit the hacker definition controversy and ambiguity page for a better understanding. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy).

[1]http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Poulsen

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