The Art of Deception
The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the low-tech threats to high-tech security Kevin Mitnick's exploits as a cyber-desperado and fugitive form one of the most exhaustive FBI manhunts in history and have spawned dozens of articles, books, films, and documentaries. Since his release from federal prison, in 1998, Mitnick has turned his life around and established himself as one of the most sought-after computer security experts worldwide. Now, in The Art of Deception, the world's most notorious hacker gives new meaning to the old adage, "It takes a thief to catch a thief." Focusing on the human factors involved with information security, Mitnick explains why all the firewalls and encryption protocols in the world will never be enough to stop a savvy grifter intent on rifling a corporate database or an irate employee determined to crash a system. With the help of many fascinating true stories of successful attacks on business and government, he illustrates just how susceptible even the most locked-down information systems are to a slick con artist impersonating an IRS agent. Narrating from the points of view of both the attacker and the victims, he explains why each attack was so successful and how it could have been prevented in an engaging and highly readable style reminiscent of a true-crime novel.
Stats for nerds
34recommend
68mentions
54people
2007–2026years
68% recommend29% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Art of Deception was one of my favorite books when it came out.
- Wow first I’ve heard of this. Insane 2000’s vibes. Honestly though the demonstration social engineering to get a free pizza was pretty cool, and terrifying since that same pattern is applied to pwn sites and stuff.
Will check out the Art of Deception book they recommended, seems good to learn about the low tech ways we can be manipulated to get past security.
- A long time ago, I ran into the books The Art of Deception and How to Lie With Statistics. They seemed like a good start on training people to spot deceptions. There were articles here on things like p-hacking. Then, the replication crisis.
While no time now, I’m still interested in making a list of resources (esp free) that tells how to construct good studies, has comprehensive presentation of all categories of mistakes/lies we see in them, examples of each, and practice studies with known errors. Anyone here got good books or URL’s that could go in a resource like that? That could train new reviewers quickly?
If I return to AI or ever work in it, I also planned to teach all of that to AI models to automatically review scientific papers. Might contribute to solving the replication crisis. Anyone who’s doing AI now feel free to jump on that. Get a startup or Ph.D. with a tool that tells us which of the rest are fake.
- Anything's possible, but the simplest explanation (per Occam's razor) is just that the employee was fooled.
Is it plausible that if a good social engineer cold-called a bunch of employees, they'd eventually get one to reveal some info? Yes, it happens quite frequently.
So any suggestion that it was an inside job, or used deep fakes, or something like that would require additional evidence.
Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" covers this extensively. The first few calls to employees wouldn't be attempts to actually get the secret info, it'd be to get inside lingo so that future calls would sound like they were from the inside.
For example, the article says the caller was familiar with the floor plan of the office.
The first call might be something like "Hey, I'm a new employee. Where are the IT staff, are they on our floor?" - they might learn "What do you mean, everyone's on the 2nd floor, we don't have any other floors. IT are on the other side of the elevators from us."
They hang up, and now with their next call they can pretend to be someone from IT and say something about the floor plan to sound more convincing.
- Aw this is a bummer. RIP. I'll never forget reading The Art of Deception in high school.
- If you're looking for other stories, The Art of Deception (Mitnick specific) and The Art of Intrusion (not all Mitnick) have a ton.
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