Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" For a long time, I was portrayed as the Osama bin Laden of the Internet, and I really wanted to be able to tell my side of the story. I wanted to be able to explain exactly what I did and what I didn't do to people who thought they knew me. "

Kevin Mitnick

Thought

Time

Story

Related Quotes:

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator. "

Kevin Mitnick

School

Computers

" The hacking trend has definitely turned criminal because of e-commerce. "

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

" I use Mac. Not because it's more secure than everything else - because it is actually less secure than Windows - but I use it because it is still under the radar. People who write malicious code want the greatest return on their investment, so they target Windows systems. I still work with Windows in virtual machines. "

" 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. "

" Then again, my case was all about the misappropriation of source code because I wanted to become the best hacker in the world and I enjoyed beating the security mechanisms. "

" I could pose as a Yahoo rep claiming that there's been some sort of fault, and somebody else is getting your e-mail, and we're going to have to remove your account and reinstall it. So what we'll do is reset the current password that you have - and by the way, what is it? "

" 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. "

" When somebody asks for a favor involving information, if you don't know him or can't verify his identity, just say no. "

" 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. "

" Not being allowed to use the Internet is kind of like not being allowed to use a telephone. "

Kevin Mitnick

Telephone

Being

" Nine out of every 10 large corporations and government agencies have been attacked by computer intruders. "

" Both social engineering and technical attacks played a big part in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when it was appropriate, and exploited technical vulnerabilities when it was appropriate. "

" A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted. "

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

" When an attacker fails with one person, they often go to another person. The key is to report the attack to other departments. Workers should know to act like they are going along with what the hacker wants and take copious notes so the company will know what the hacker is trying to find. "

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

" 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. "

" No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most companies did not until the laws required them to. It's in the best interest of organisations - when they're attacked and information is stolen - to tell nobody. "

" All they need to do is to set up some website somewhere selling some bogus product at twenty percent of the normal market prices and people are going to be tricked into providing their credit card numbers. "

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

" 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. "