In 1994 the New York Times reported that Kevin Mitnick “used a computer and a modem to break into NORAD” this of course was often repeated in several outlets including the St Petersburg Times and elsewhere for several years. Even as late as 1999 CNN was still reporting this bit of information as fact claiming the Mitnick had actually inspired the 1983 movie “War Games”.
Of course the reality is much more mundane. Despite CNN stating this as a fact in 1999, it was actually disproved in 1996 by Katie Hafner, a Newsweek Senior Editor, who, according to the Chicago Tribune, “could find no evidence that the NORAD story was anything but myth.” But it wasn’t until Mitnick himself published his own book “Ghost in the Wires” in 2010 do we find out that the whole NORAD myth was the result of an over zealous federal prosecutor who claimed Mitnick could “whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile.” Which was one of the many absurd reasons why Mitnick spent so much time in solitary confinement.
In 1999 a small weekly paper in the UK called the Sunday Business ran a small little story entitled “Satellite Held for Ransom” that claimed an intruder had actually been able to “seized control of one of Britain’s military satellites”, had altered its course and issued blackmail threats. Of course the story was printed on Sunday and by Monday morning it had hit the Reuters wire services spreading it all over the world. The problem was the story was basically completely made up. It took a couple of days but Reuters was finally able to get an official quote denying the allegation from the British Defense Ministry. Of course few, if any of the newspapers that picked up the original story ran the follow up. But this story doesn’t end there. Nine years later an article on PCMag.com listed what it called “The 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes” and the number two ‘crime’ on that list was an attack on a British military satellite that never actually happened. It is obvious that PCMag didn’t do much fact checking on that story.
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