I'm very much surprised to see this. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/las-vegas-nv/kevin-mitnick-113716...
Crazy. I remember reading that John Markoff book, with Katie Hafner I think? I forget the naem. This is before he got busted. If I remember history right, there was that Shimimura guy that hutned Mitnick down and worked with the feds to bust him. Then he teamed up with John Markoff to write a book about it and I think they sold the screenplay. BUT... this wasn't their first work together. In the first issue of Wired there is an article called Good Timing! About the Oki 900 cell phone. Markoff is talking to some anonymous guy about modified firmware that would allow the keypad reprogramming of the cellular ESN and phone number (MIN) on the Oki 900 cell phone, something that wasn't supposed to be possible (It enabled fraud.) The story goes, it was Shimimura that had this firmware (not sure if he developed it?) and Mitnick was trying to get a copy. Shimumura was rumored to be the guy in the Good Timing! article that Markoff was interviewing, so they already had a relationship. The hunt for Mitnick made the next good story to write. They never mention the cellular fraud tools what were being sought after. I do know in the book about the bust that I think he had an Oki-900 with the special cable called a C-Tek that let him monitor the control data from the cell site where he lived, and it triggered alerts when the FBI would come onto his cell tower. So he probably already had that firmware was my guess, and was after the source or other interesting things? Never asked him and never researched it. I never had any of this stuff, I just remember reading about it. This was old Analog AMPS cellular system stuff. The C-TEK stuff sounded really cool. - Ethan