Kevin Mitnick Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“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.”

“For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must. A personal firewall such as Zone Alarm and running a program like HFNetcheck, which is a free download for personal users. It checks your system to see if anything needs to be patched. I'd also recommend a program such as SpyCop to periodically check for any spyware on your system.”

“I got so passionate about technology. Hacking to me was like a video game. It was about getting trophies. I just kept going on and on, despite all the trouble I was getting into, because I was hooked.”

“My hacking was all about becoming the best at circumventing security. So when I was a fugitive, I worked systems administrator jobs to make money. I wasn't stealing money or using other people's credit cards. I was doing a 9-to-5 job.”

“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.”

“Any type of operating system that I wanted to be able to hack, I basically compromised the source code, copied it over to the university because I didn't have enough space on my 200 megabyte hard drive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”