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...”

“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...”

“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.”

“I saw myself as an electronic joy rider.”

“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.”

“Anything out there is vulnerable to attack given enough time and resources.”

“Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your...”

“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...”

“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 vulnerab...”

“Hacking is exploiting security controls either in a technical, physical or a human-based element.”

“Phone phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees.”

“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.”

“It's kind of interesting, because hacking is a skill that could be used for criminal purposes or legitimate purposes, and so even though in the past I was hacking for the curiosity, and the...”

“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.”

“I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.”

“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.”

“The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.”

“I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage.”

“I was fascinated with the phone system and how it worked; I became a hacker to get better control over the phone company.”

“The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.”