Hi and welcome back to Sabirism's malicious life. I'm Gran Levy. A few weeks ago, after we released the second part of the Albert Gonzalez series, I came across this interesting tweet from one of our listeners,

Omar Mechreeli.

Omar wrote, quote, greatest hacker in the world?

Soup Nazi was a lot of things.

Calling him that is ignorant.

He wasn't even the brightest hacker in his own circle of friends.

In reply, Sherry Devidov, our guest in the series, wrote, quote, agreed that he wasn't super technical,

but as prosecutors said, he was, quote, unparalleled in that he didn't just get a hack done.

He got a hack done.

He got the exfiltration of the data done.

He got the laundering of the funds done.

He was a five tool player and quote.

Omel later replied with a rebuttal of his own but the reason why I mentioned this short

conversation has nothing to do with how good of a hacker

Gonzales was. I mean, there's no hacker rating system that we can use to figure out who was the best hacker ever.

Heck in basketball we have real bona fide statistics, shots, misses, whatever, and my daughter and her friends still can't agree on who was

the best NBA player ever, Michael Jordan or

LeBron James. But Omer's tweet got me thinking about the relationship

between a hacker and the technological environment he or she

operates in. Take for example Kevin Mitnick, who did most of his hacking in the early 90s.

The technological landscape back then was very different from our current one. The internet, for example, was still pretty young.

If we could magically transport Young Mitnick to our current time? Would he still be as successful as he was back then?

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