Kevin Mitnick Quotes

There is no patch for stupidity.

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect your self as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.

Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.

Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause.

Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business.

Social engineering is using deception, manipulation and influence to convince a human who has access to a computer system to do something, like click on an attachment in an e-mail.

As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.

The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.

Social engineers veil themselves in a cloak of believability.

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.

Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.

Oracle, for example, has even hired people to dumpster dive for information about its competitor, Microsoft. It's not even illegal, because trash isn't covered by data secrecy laws.

When I was in prison, a Colombian drug lord, offered me $5 million in cash to manipulate a computer system so that he would be released. I turned him down.

I made stupid decisions as a kid, or as a young adult, but I'm trying to be now, I'm trying to take this lemon and make lemonade.

The intent of the individuals who created the DDoS attacks has nothing to do with hacking, and they are vandals, not hackers.

I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.

I believe in having each device secured and monitoring each device, rather than just monitoring holistically on the network, and then responding in short enough time for damage control.

Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.

The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.

A hacker doesnt deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.

New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing.

I saw myself as an electronic joy rider.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.

So the ethic I was taught in school resulted in the path I chose in my life following school.

I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I'm applying what I know to improve security at companies.

Some people think technology has the answers.

I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.

The human. Now you know all about your target

I get hired by companies to hack into their systems and break into their physical facilities to find security holes. Our success rate is 100%; we've always found a hole.

Of course I'm sure half the people there hate me and half the people like me

I trust online banking. You know why? Because if somebody hacks into my account and defrauds my credit card company, or my online bank account, guess who takes the loss? The bank, not me.

The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests.

You can't go to Windows Update and get a patch for stupidity.

No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses. Sun didn't stop using Solaris and DEC didn't stop using VMS.

We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.

I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.

For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.

My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.

I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.

The perfect PIN is not four digits and not associated with your life, like an old telephone number. It's something easy for you to remember and hard for other people to guess.

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

No way, no how did I break into NORAD. That's a complete myth. And I never attempted to access anything considered to be classified government systems.

Use a personal firewall. Configure it to prevent other computers, networks and sites from connecting to you, and specify which programs are allowed to connect to the net automatically.

I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage.

I went from being a kid who loved to perform magic tricks to becoming the world's most notorious hacker, feared by corporations and the government.

What I found personally to be true was that it's easier to manipulate people rather than technology.