> One day she asks me, “You know why nobody knows who I am?” > No, I say, thinking back to a year previous — before the plague, before our phone calls, before

> One day she asks me, “You know why nobody knows who I am?” > No, I say, thinking back to a year previous — before the plague, before our phone calls, before I finally found Susan, when her name still meant nothing to me. > “Because I never got caught,” she says. “All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.” And it's that kind of arrogance and survivorship bias that gets you thinking you're better than you are. She was lucky she was not caught, or the others were unlucky they did get caught. The people around her that she considered as her fellow peers got caught after all. > I went looking for the great lost female hacker of the 1980s. I should have known that she didn’t want to be found. But then she _WAS_ found for the purpose of writing this article. So if not getting caught is the measure of being a good hacker... And she'll be incredibly easy to track down now. > Kevin Mitnick publicly maintains that he had nothing to do with the destruction of the US Leasing files. In his autobiography, he characterizes Susan as a “wannabe hacker” who took revenge on him and Lewis using a backdoor into the US Leasing system that he had created. I'm inclined to agree with Mitnick. There are numerous examples in this article alone of her acting in a vengeful manner, e.g.: > But when one of her exasperated targets called her a small-brained little twerp, Susan got mad. In retribution, she called the phone company and, posing as the woman, had her phone number changed. And really how likely is this to actually be true: > She claims to be one of only three women to have slept with all four Beatles, securing the trickiest, Paul McCartney, through an elaborate pretext that involved having his wife Linda whisked away in a limo for a staged photoshoot. It reads like the wishful thinking of somebody who had bigger dreams than their own reality, clinically delusional. Some of these things I could let go, but there is too much "it happened, trust me". Bare in mind that the _ENTIRE_ point of social hacking is to spin a lie so good that you believe it yourself.