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. – 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
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government’s false claims. – Kevin Mitnick
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984. – Kevin Mitnick
I use Spam Arrest because of the amount of junk mail I get. Any legitimate person who wants to send me a message has to jump through hoops before they can be added to my opt-in list. – Kevin Mitnick
Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most companies did not until the laws required them to. It’s in the best interest of organisations – when they’re attacked and information is stolen – to tell nobody. – 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
When I read about myself in the media, even I don’t recognize me. 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
I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game. – Kevin Mitnick
Businesses should absolutely set aside funding in their budgets for security consultants. Unless there is an expert on staff, and there usually is not, it needs to be outsourced. – Kevin Mitnick
Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company’s internal jargon. – Kevin Mitnick
What happens with smaller businesses is that they give in to the misconception that their site is secure because the system administrator deployed standard security products – firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or stronger authentication devices such as time-based tokens or biometric smart cards. But those things can be exploited. – Kevin Mitnick
I trust online banking. You know why? Because if somebody hacks into my account and defrauds my credit card company, or my online bank account, guess who takes the loss? The bank, not me. – Kevin Mitnick
I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it’s actually easier than it was years ago. – 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
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
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
Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business. – 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
I was fascinated with the phone system and how it worked; I became a hacker to get better control over the phone company. – Kevin Mitnick
I went from being a kid who loved to perform magic tricks to becoming the world’s most notorious hacker, feared by corporations and the government. – Kevin Mitnick
The hacker mindset doesn’t actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim. – Kevin Mitnick
I’m an expert witness in a case that’s in appeal about a guy who allegedly misappropriated source code from a major, major company – he actually worked there and then apparently they found it on his laptop later. – Kevin Mitnick
My argument is not that I shouldn’t have been punished, but that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. – Kevin Mitnick