Originally posted here by MsMittens
He didn't lose his reputation over this. There wasn't any to lose. It was his first book that did that. Plagiarism doesn't go over well in a professional community. That said, his present version of his site is more of a "search-spyware-distribution" kind of thing (IMO).

Kevin Mitnick may be in a similar boat. Depending on who you talk with, he had no reputation to begin with and is a "media whore". So how can one lose a reputation when one didn't have one to start with?

Defacements aren't really at the same level of reputation ruining as say sending faxes out with personal information and then blaming the receiver for releasing private information or releasing machines without doing proper equipment exit procedures. From what I've seen defacements are often considered minor compared to when data is actually proven to be released. That said, many of these activities often identify the flaws in the procedures for day-to-day business. The question is does business learn from these mistakes?
bravo. that was well put and to the point. i would say that you are usually almost always looking at a procedure problem - except for program design flaws (but even then, it's a procedure problem that resides at the prog deginer/vendor level before it hits customer), and perhaps protocol weaknesses - e.g. tcp/ip was designed to communicate. it was never designed with security in mind because at the time when they were designing it - no one ever thought security issues would plauge computing as much as they do.