zlacker

>>thirty+(OP)
My parents vaguely remembered who Kevin Mitnick was when I gave my father my copy of 'Ghost in the Wires' to read.

I told him, this was the 'hacker' of the 80s, read how he managed to 'hack' all these places. My father replied, "I'm pretty sure I won't understand anything he would do". Me, "Just give it a chance, you'll be surprised"

When he gave the book back, I asked my father if anything Kevin did my father wouldn't have understood. My father said, "I understood everything he did". I asked, "Now, when you get a call from someone you don't know claiming to be an authority figure, what do you do?". Father: "Hang up"

>>jboy55+Af
Would there be a modern version of this? I haven't read it and I'm interested, but mostly my parents are getting old, and with AI on the corner, I fear a bit the next level scams.

>>dryrun+tl
Any time a big hack makes the news it turns out that either some system had no security, they used social engineering, or a disgruntled former employee. Hackers aren't sitting there with a super computer in a Guy Fawkes mask trying to decrypt data. The scams are the same now as back then.

>>TheBig+1d1
> Any time a big hack makes the news it turns out that either some system had no security, they used social engineering, or a disgruntled former employee.

Back in 2003 or so, my boss showed up at my desk at work, and looked like he was about to blow a gasket. There was a hack that was on the news, and it was getting featured in news stories all over the world.

He basically said he was going to fire me if it turned out it was my fault. (I built the servers that held the data that was compromised.)

Within a day, it turned out that it wasn't all the data, it was just one person, who had a lot of famous friends.

What had happened was that someone had accessed her account. The way that they did it was by guessing her password. Her password was the same as her dog's name, and she was a celebrity known to be seen at events with her dog.