Kevin Mitnick Quotes
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The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme.
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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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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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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.
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A hacker doesn't deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.
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We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.
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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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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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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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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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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 was an accomplished computer trespasser. I don't consider myself a thief. I copied without permission.
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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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When somebody asks for a favor involving information, if you don't know him or can't verify his identity, just say no.
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I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.
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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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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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Once when I was a fugitive, I was working for a law firm in Denver.
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A log-in simulator is a program to trick some unknowing user into providing their user name and password.
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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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Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.
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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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I keep my stuff updated all the time. Being in the security industry, I keep up to date with securities.
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I have done a lot to rehabilitate my reputation.