http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/19/att_dumps_kevin_mitnick/Over the past month, both HostedHere.net, his longtime webhost, and AT&T, his cellular provider since he was released from prison more than nine years ago, have told him they no longer want him as a customer. The reason: his status as a celebrity hacker makes his accounts too hard to defend against the legions of script kiddies who regularly attack them.
The move by AT&T came this week after Mitnick hired a lawyer to complain that his privacy was being invaded by people posting Mitnick's account information in public hacking forums. It included the eight-digit password Mitnick used to authenticate himself online, the numbers for his cell phone and land lines, his billing address, and the last four digits of his social security number.
"They can't seem to secure my account," Mitnick told The Register. "And then instead of doing something about it, they try to kill the messenger and want to boot me off their network when all I want them to do is to secure my account so no one gets access to my phone records."
Mitnick said the cellular account has been repeatedly breached over the years, despite a wide range of countermeasures he's followed to prevent the attacks. In recent years, he's committed the password to memory and has deliberately not shared it with anyone or kept it stored on a computer. For a while, his former girlfriend, who was also repeatedly attacked, disabled her online account altogether, but even then she regularly found it would later be restored. The people carrying out the attacks would then post the phone records online in an attempt to embarrass them.
"There are so many ways into these networks," he said. "They have to take some responsibility, not just silence the people that are filing complaints."
Read the rest of this at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/19/att_dumps_kevin_mitnick/.
