Chapter 1
Kevin's Story
by Kevin Mitnick

John Markoff, the Media's Grifter

"Combining technical wizardry with the ages-old guile of a grifter, Kevin Mitnick is a computer programmer run amok." (The New York Times, 7/4/94.)

Combining the ages-old desire to attain undeserved fortune with the power to publish false and defamatory stories about his subjects on the front page of the New York Times, John Markoff was truly a technology reporter run amok.

Markoff was to earn himself over $1 million by single-handedly creating what I label "The Myth of Kevin Mitnick." He became very wealthy through the very same technique I used to compromise computer systems and networks around the world: deception. In this case however, the victim of the deception wasn't a single computer user or system administrator, it was every person who trusted the news stories published in the pages of the New York Times.

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