Kevin Mitnick Quotes

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Kevin Mitnick

Profession : Businessman

Birth : August 6, 1963

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

Kevin Mitnick

So the ethic I was taught in school resulted in the path I chose in my life following school.

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

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

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

Kevin Mitnick

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.

Kevin Mitnick

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.

Kevin Mitnick

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.

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

No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses. Sun didn't stop using Solaris and DEC didn't stop using VMS.

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

Once when I was a fugitive, I was working for a law firm in Denver.

Kevin Mitnick

I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I'm applying what I know to improve security at companies.

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 was an accomplished computer trespasser. I don't consider myself a thief.

Kevin Mitnick

I saw myself as an electronic joy rider.

Kevin Mitnick

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.

Kevin Mitnick

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.

Kevin Mitnick

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

Kevin Mitnick

It doesn't work the same way everywhere. The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests. People in the former Soviet bloc countries are less trusting, perhaps because of their previous experiences with their countries' secret services.

Kevin Mitnick