Kevin Mitnick Quotes
3 min readApr 10, 2023
- I have done a lot to rehabilitate my reputation.
- Usually companies hire me, and they know full well who I am, and that’s one of the reasons they want to hire me.
- A hacker doesn’t deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.
- Being on the run wasn’t fun, but it was something I had to do. I was actually working in legitimate jobs. I wasn’t living on people’s credit cards. I was living like a character out of a movie. It was performance art.
- The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone’s communications.
- 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.
- One of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone phreak. When he’d attempt to make a call from home, he’d get a message telling him to deposit a dime, because the telephone company switch received input that indicated he was calling from a pay phone.
- 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.
- Security is always going to be a cat and mouse game because there’ll be people out there that are hunting for the zero day award, you have people that don’t have configuration management, don’t have vulnerability management, don’t have patch management.
- A lot of individuals out there carry a lot of proprietary information on their mobile devices, and they’re not protected. It’s a very target-rich environment.
- The hacking trend has definitely turned criminal because of e-commerce.
- 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.
- 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.
- When somebody asks for a favor involving information, if you don’t know him or can’t verify his identity, just say no.
- I don’t know the capabilities of our enemies. But I found it quite easy to circumvent security at certain phone companies throughout the United States. So if an inquisitive kid can do it, why can’t a cyberterrorist do it?
- 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.
- Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!
- 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 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.
- The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher’s password and all the other students’ passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.
