It was midnight on February 15, 1995, and the world's most notorious hacker had just returned to his modest apartment in Riley, North Carolina. After a long day at work and a brief stint on his computer, Kevin Mitnick took a break and spent an hour at the gym.

He then grabbed some dinner at a 24-hour diner and headed back home,

ready for another long night of poking and probing distant computer systems.

But as he sat down in front of the screen, a strange feeling crept over him. Something wasn't right. The night was still. The lights

were off in most of the neighboring apartments and no suspicious vans lingered nearby.

He had a solid fake identity and having shed 100 pounds he didn't look remotely like

the grubby dishevelled young man whose picture was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

He was safe. Maybe he was just being paranoid. Being a fugitive on the run for two and a half years could do that to a person.

Mitnick returned his attention to the files and directories on the screen but couldn't shake the uneasy feeling so he got up and went to the front door.

It opened up to a corridor that gave him an excellent view of the parking lot.

He picked outside cautiously. Nothing. It was just his

imagination. That's all. Mitnick returned to his seat. He didn't know it at the

time but it was this cautious peak that gave him away. Hi, I'm Ryan Levy. Welcome to Cyber Reasons Malicious Life. There's little to no dispute that Kevin Mitnick was one of the best social engineers in history, perhaps even the greatest.

His exploits and shenanigans are still being taught at cyber security training seminars as textbook examples of social engineering,

despite the fact that the technological landscape in which Mitnick pulled them off,

a world of landline telephony systems, fax machines, and public

payphones is very different from our modern one.

But whenever Mitnick's name is mentioned in the context of hacking, it is usually accompanied by a caveat.

Mitnick, it is often said, wasn't a great coder.

And it's true, although he did know how to write code, that wasn't his forte, and he often

preferred using tools written by other more talented programmers. In modern parlance we have a name for hackers who don't know

how to write malware and use other people's exploits and it's not a very

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