Tsutomu shimomura biography of william
From “The New York Times”
7.20.23
Alex Traub
Best known for an audacious hacking spree in the 1990s involving the theft of data and credit card numbers, he later became a security consultant and public speaker.
Kevin Mitnick [a distant relative], who at the dawn of widespread internet usage in the mid-1990s became the nation’s archetypal computer hacker — obsessive but clever, shy but mischievous and threatening to an uncertain degree — and who later used his skills to become “chief hacking officer” of a cybersecurity firm, died on Sunday in Pittsburgh. He was 59.
Kevin Mitnick, giving a speech in 2011 in Spain. In the 1990s, he became the archetypal computer hacker. Credit: Kai Foersterling/European Pressphoto Agency.
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker, by Kevin Mitnick with William L. Simon.
Kathy Wattman, a spokeswoman for the cybersecurity company he partly owned, KnowBe4, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Described by The New York Times in 1995 as “the nation’s most wanted computer outlaw,” Mr. Mitnick was a fugitive for more than two years.
He was sought for gaining illegal access to about 20,000 credit card numbers, including some belonging to Silicon Valley moguls; causing millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer operations; and stealing software used for maintaining the privacy of wireless calls and handling billing information.
Ultimately he was caught and spent five years in prison. Yet no evidence emerged that Mr. Mitnick used the files he had stolen for financial gain. He would later defend his activities as a high stakes but, in the end, harmless form of play.
“Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent,” he wrote in a 2011 memoir, Ghost in the Wires. “You don’t have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.”
At the time of Mr. Mitnick’s capture, in February 1995, the computer age was still young; Windows 95 had n In 1995, Raleigh woke to the spellbinding news that an FBI fugitive, a mad-scientist computer hacker gifted at burrowing into secret files, had been captured in a nondescript apartment off Duraleigh Road — along with a confiscated trove of electronics, maps and a Denny’s napkin. When the city first glimpsed Kevin Mitnick, then 31, he was unshaven and bespectacled in a black sweatsuit, his hair in a ponytail and his hands in shackles, heading into a Wake County jail cell — end of the road for a cyber-pirate known as “The Condor.” But over the next year, a sprawling adventure story would unfold, pitting the shy, unassuming Mitnick against Tsutomu Shimomura, the super-brained physicist and security expert who tracked the hacker down out of spite for being one of his victims. And though that story would evolve, showing Mitnick to be less a villain out for money than a cutting-edge rogue motivated by a hacking challenge, he would serve nearly five years in prison. By the time he died last week at 59, the man formerly known as “Cyberspace’s Most Wanted” was working as a “white-hat hacker,” getting paid to do what once made him a criminal. Some even called him a hero. “They have made me out to be John Dillinger or a desperado,” he once told The Guardian, “but I’m just an excellent prankster. I have never profited from it.” A native of Southern California, Mitnick launched his hacker’s life at age 12, when he figured out how to rejig the Los Angeles bus passes so he could ride for free. 2 AppearancesRemembering cyberspace’s most-wanted hacker and his unlikely capture in Raleigh in 1995
A ‘white-hat hacker’
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Tsutomu Shimomura
Physicist and computer security expert (born 1964)
Tsutomu Shimomura (下村 努, Shimomura Tsutomu, born October 23, 1964) is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hackerKevin Mitnick. Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject with journalistJohn Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.
Shimomura was a founder of semiconductor company Neofocal Systems, and was CEO and CTO until 2016.
Biography
Born in Japan, Shimomura is the son of Osamu Shimomura, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended Princeton High School.
At Caltech he studied under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. After Caltech, he went on to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his hands-on education in the position of staff physicist with Brosl Hasslacher and others on subjects such as lattice gas automata.
In 1989, he became a research scientist in computational physics at the University of California, San Diego, and senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Shimomura also became a noted computer security expert, working for the National Security Agency.
In 1992, he testified before Congress on issues regarding the privacy and security (or lack thereof) on cellular telephones. Author Bruce Sterling described his first meeting with Shimomura in the documentary Freedom Downtime:
It was in front of Congress, and I was testifying to a Congressional subcommittee. And here was this guy in sandals and, like, ragged-ass cutoffs, and the rest of us were done up in ties [...] giving our best sort of 'yes, we're in front of Congress' thing and Shimomura is there in this surfer gear.
He is best known for events in 1995, when he assisted with tracking down the computer hacker Kevin Mitnick. In that year Shimomura also received prank calls which popularized the phrase "My kung fu is stronge