Kevin Mitnick Quotes
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Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.
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The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.
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No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses.
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We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.
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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.
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If I needed to know about a security exploit, I preferred to get the information by accessing the companies' security teams' files, rather than poring over lines of code to find it on my own. It's just more efficient.
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I saw myself as an electronic joy rider. I was like James Bond behind the computer. I was just having a blast.
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The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.
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I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.
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I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.
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I'm not a fugitive anymore. Never will be in the future. After spending five years in jail, you learn your lesson. I never want to return there.
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But a lot of businesses out there don't see the return on investment, they look at it as a liability, and until they can understand that proactive security actually returns, gives them a return on investment, it's still a hard sell for people.
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A hacker doesn't deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.
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I have done a lot to rehabilitate my reputation.
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I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access.
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Our Constitution requires that the accused be presumed innocent before trial, thus granting all citizens the right to a bail hearing, where the accused has the opportunity to be represented by counsel, present evidence, and cross-examine witnesses.
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A lot of companies are clueless, because they spend most or all of their security budget on high-tech security like fire walls and biometric authentication - which are important and needed - but then they don't train their people.
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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.
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It's true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker.
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I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.
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I got so passionate about technology. Hacking to me was like a video game. It was about getting trophies. I just kept going on and on, despite all the trouble I was getting into, because I was hooked.
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My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.
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Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.
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Once when I was a fugitive, I was working for a law firm in Denver.