Cyber-Security on Whaliams Wall

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:54:18 -0700

Kevin Mitnick was a Top 10 most wanted criminal by the FBI when he went on the run. His exploits are that of legend, and that is part of the problem. Repeatedly, mythical abilities have been assigned to Mitnick when interacting with law enforcement and the judiciary. While his skills were amongst the best in the world, he could not whistle into a phone to order a missile strike. His story is fraught with these mislabelings, and ultimately should have us all asking questions about law enforcement, legal proceedings, and how we handle high tech crimes.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:27:49 -0700

Max “Vision” Butler was an awkward kid from Ada County, Idaho. His path was crossed with violence, betrayals, hacking, and ultimately carding. Carding is the practice of creating fake credit and debit cards for malicious use, and few can say they did, in that field than Butler. His tale is one of extremes, working for law enforcement one day, but preemptively creating “self healing” viruses the next when his handlers were slow to respond. He would use stole credit card data, but then buy food and work tools for a down-on-their-luck family with it. While most moral compasses tend to give strong deference to the law, Butler did not. While aware the law existed and the consequences for violating it, he seems to have not allowed it to steer his course.

Cybersecurity Reading List

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:50:34 -0700

I hope to create dedicated pages for the most notable of entries on this list, but for now just need a place to quickly jot them all down.

Books

While I tend to prefer nonfiction titles for this genre, there are some notable works of fiction that I feel are good reads for interested parties to be familiar with as well.

Nonfiction

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, 1984. A series of stories about the people who created modern computing.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:17:04 -0700

An essential anthology for anyone wanting to learn about the origins of modern computing. Originally published in 1984, this book chronicles multiple groups dating back to the 1950s, the people who forged the original profile of the hacker. This book focuses on creators of early personal computing kits (Steve Wozniak and Lee Felsenstein), Ted Hoff, the designer of the legendary Intel 4004 microprocessor, and Stewart Brand, the publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The Cuckoos Egg

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:29:42 -0700

The Cuckoo’s Egg is the autobiographical account of an astronomy student who’s grant ran out so he got a job in the university’s IT department. A 75 cent discrepancy in the accounting software would lead him down a rabbit hole of hackers, military and national security systems, and academia. This all being told from the author’s experiences it is a fascinating tale of the very real world of cyber security in the twilight years of the Cold War.