Quotes from Kevin D. Mitnick

10phtCrack. The magic this program performs is taken for granted by those who use it, and I suspect thoroughly hated by a great many others. The l0pht group garnered media attention because they wrote a tool (called 10phtCrack) that quickly cracked password hashes.

social engineering"—the casual or calculated manipulation of people to influence them to do things they would not ordinarily do. And convincing them without raising the least hint of suspicion.

for example the rule set called leetspeak—a system for replacing letters with numbers, as in "k3v1n m17n1ck.

Every time [some software engineer] says, "Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that," there's some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble. — Alex Mayfield

Speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress, an annual computer hacker conference held in Berlin, Germany, Tobias Engel, founder of Sternraute, and Karsten Nohl, chief scientist for Security Research Labs, explained that they could not only locate cell-phone callers anywhere in the world, they could also listen in on their phone conversations. And if they couldn't listen in real time, they could record the encrypted calls and texts for later decryption.

I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.

Every time some [developer] says, 'Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that,' there's some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble.

But have you ever felt that something was so good it couldn't possibly last?

The maximum sentence was twenty years for each free phone call. Twenty years for each call! I was facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.

When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol' Boy sheriff laughed and said, "You're the only prisoner we ever had that got booted out of jail!

One noted software libertarian, Richard Stallman, even refused to protect his account with a password.

If we had ever met in person, I would have given her a kiss to thank her for all the wonderful help she gave me. Ann, if you read this, your kiss is waiting.

The difference can be summed up in one word: authorization. I don't need authorization to get in. It's the word that instantly transforms me from the World's Most Wanted Hacker to one of the Most Wanted Security Experts in the world. Just like magic.

There isn't any loving, romantic way to put this: I told Bonnie we needed to get married so she couldn't testify against me, and also so she could visit me if I landed in jail, which was looking like the way things were headed.

Right away, I invited on guests like Steve Wozniak, John Draper, and even porn star Danni Ashe, who took her top off in the studio to show us all how hot she was. (Listen up, Howard Stern, I'm following in your footsteps!)

Anyone who thinks that security products alone offer true security is settling for the illusion of security.

A typical call in one of my routines went like this: Me: What city, please? Caller: Providence. Me: What is the name, please? Caller: John Norton. Me: Is this a business or a residence? Caller: Residence. Me: The number is 836, 5 one-half 66. At this point the caller was usually either baffled or indignant. Caller: How do I dial one-half?! Me: Go pick up a new phone that has uh-half on it. The reactions I got were hilarious.

Every hacker is to some extent a rebel who lives by different standards and enjoys beating the system.

knowing you're smarter than somebody and you can beat them. And that, in our case, it was gonna make us some money.

F___k being a script kiddie if you can avoid it — be a hacker.

In the midst of this culture of openness and sharing, we need to think carefully about the information we're volunteering to the world. Sometimes the world is listening.

Social engineering uses influence and persuasion to deceive people by convincing them that the social engineer is someone he is not, or by manipulation. As a result, the social engineer is able to take advantage of people to obtain information with or without the use of technology.

Take a moment and surf over to Panopticlick.com. This is a site built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that will determine just how common or unique your browser configuration is compared to others, based on what's running on your PC or mobile device's operating system and the plug-ins you may have installed.

In security, you are only as secure as the weakest link.