Quotes from 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.

It's actually a smarter crime because imagine if you rob a bank, or you're dealing drugs. If you get caught you're going to spend a lot of time in custody. But with hacking, it's much easier to commit the crime and the risk of punishment is slim to none.

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.

I don't know of any case that involves computer hacking where there were multiple defendants charged where there wasn't an informant on the case.

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.

Nine out of every 10 large corporations and government agencies have been attacked by computer intruders.

Penetrating a company's security often starts with the bad guy obtaining some piece of information that seems so innocent, so everyday and unimportant, that most people in the organization don't see any reason why the item should be protected and restricted.

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.

I happen to be notorious. That, I have no control over.

I keep my stuff updated all the time. Being in the security industry, I keep up to date with securities.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

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.

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.

We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.

Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause.

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.

A log-in simulator is a program to trick some unknowing user into providing their user name and password.

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.

When somebody asks for a favor involving information, if you don't know him or can't verify his identity, just say no.

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.

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.

The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.

I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.

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.