Kevin Mitnick Quotes
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I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.
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Hacking was the only entertainment that would occupy my mind - like a huge video game, but with real consequences. I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.
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My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems.
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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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Of course I'm sure half the people there hate me and half the people like me.
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The best thing to do is always keep randomly generated passwords everywhere and use a password tool to manage it, and then you don't have to remember those passwords at all, just the master password that unlocks the database.
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As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.
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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.
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There's a feature on Facebook where you can enable security that checks the device you're coming from. By default these features are likely off, but as a consumer, you can enable them.
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Not being allowed to use the Internet is kind of like not being allowed to use a telephone.
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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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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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For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.
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I think malware is a significant threat because the mitigation, like antivirus software, hasn't evolved to a point to really mitigate the risk to a reasonable degree.
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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.
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If hackers, if anyone committing a criminal act, wants to reduce their risk, they obviously don't involve anybody else. The greater the circle of people that know what you're doing, the higher the risk.
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You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect yourself as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.
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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.
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Usually companies hire me, and they know full well who I am, and that's one of the reasons they want to hire me.
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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.
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I have done a lot to rehabilitate my reputation.
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I keep my stuff updated all the time. Being in the security industry, I keep up to date with securities.
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People are prone to taking mental shortcuts. They may know that they shouldn't give out certain information, but the fear of not being nice, the fear of appearing ignorant, the fear of a perceived authority figure - all these are triggers, which can be used by a social engineer to convince a person to override established security procedures.