The voicemail that jailed Kevin Mitnick — and the Porsche he left behind

In the 1990s, Shawn Nunley was a network administrator at Novell when the company’s NetWare servers became a target for a persistent intruder. Late one night, Nunley got a call from someone claiming to be a Novell employee who needed direct inbound modem access for emergency work on a real internal project, citing a vacation in Vail that matched a colleague’s voicemail greeting. The pretext was airtight, but the request violated policy, so Nunley stalled — saying he could only act from the office in the morning and asking the caller to leave a voicemail. The caller was Kevin Mitnick. Nunley recorded that voicemail onto a cassette, and it became the primary evidence in the wire fraud case against Mitnick, who faced 14 felony counts.

Nunley initially backed the prosecution but soured on it after roughly five years of trial delays and eventually stopped cooperating with the Justice Department. Mitnick took a plea deal and was released. The episode is a textbook example of social engineering — exploiting human trust and leaked internal details rather than a purely technical flaw — which remains central to how breaches happen today.

The twist is the friendship that followed. After his release, Mitnick reached out to apologize, and the two former adversaries became close friends for about 25 years, with Mitnick going on to build a respected security consulting career. When Mitnick died of pancreatic cancer in 2023, he left Nunley enough money to buy his dream car, a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS.