Quotes By Kevin Mitnick
The myth of Kevin Mitnick is much more interesting than the reality of Kevin Mitnick. If they told the reality, no one would care.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
It's actually a smarter crime because imagine if you rob a bank, or you're dealing drugs. If you get caught you're going to spend a lot of time in custody. But with hacking, it's much easier to commit the crime and the risk of punishment is slim to none.
Kevin Mitnick
My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.
Kevin Mitnick
The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.
Kevin Mitnick
I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.
Kevin Mitnick
Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker.
Kevin Mitnick
I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
I'm still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick
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.
Kevin Mitnick