Kevin Mitnick: "America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw"

Kevin David Mitnick was born on August 6, 1963, and he is one of the most famous criminal hackers to be put in prison. He received the nickname "America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw," by the police, US Marshall’s, and FBI for over two years after vanishing while on probation for his 1989 conviction for computer and access device fraud. Mitnick had previously been convicted in 1981 of destroying data over a computer network and with stealing operator's manuals from the telephone company. In 1983 he was convicted of breaking into a Pentagon computer over the ARPANET from a USC campus terminal room. Several years later he went underground for more than a year after being accused of tampering with a TRW credit reference computer; an arrest warrant was issued, but it later vanished from police records without explanation. 

He was convicted of stealing software from the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in December 1987. In 1988 Mitnick pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and one count of possessing illegal long-distance access codes after being caught for nightly attacks attempting to gain entry to Digital's corporate computer network, known as Easynet, in order to steal a copy of Digital's VMS minicomputer operating system. That was the fifth time that Mitnick had been apprehended for a computer crime, and the case attracted nationwide attention because, in an unusual plea bargain, he agreed to one year in prison and six months in a counseling program for his computer "addiction." 

His downfall was his Christmas 1994 break-in to Tsutomu Shimomura's computers in San Diego, California. Less than two months later, Tsutomu had tracked him down after a cross-country electronic pursuit. Mitnick was arrested by the FBI in Raleigh, North Carolina, on February 15th, 1995. He was convicted of wire fraud and breaking into the computer systems of Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems.