Kevin Mitnick quotes

Kevin Mitnick was an American businessman and cybersecurity expert, famously known for his previous career as a hacker. His high-profile exploits exposed serious security vulnerabilities in computer systems worldwide. He later became a respected security consultant and author, sharing his expertise to help protect organizations from cyber threats. Here are 123 of his quotes:

As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool. (Kevin Mitnick)
There is no patch for stupidity. View quote
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
I made stupid decisions as a kid, or as a young adult, but I'm trying to be now, I'm trying to take this lemon and make lemonade. View quote
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)
Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion. View quote
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
So the ethic I was taught in school resulted in the path I chose in my life following school. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
Some people think technology has the answers. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
Computer hacking really results in financial losses and hassles. The objectives of terrorist groups are more serious. That is not to say that cyber groups can't access a telephone switch in Manhattan on a day like 9/11, shut it down, and therefore cause more casualties. View quote
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
Of course I'm sure half the people there hate me and half the people like me. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted. (Kevin Mitnick)
You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect your self as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk. View quote
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
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. View quote
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. View quote
Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick - Image
Photo: Campus Party México, CC BY 2.0
Occupation: American Businessman
Born: August 6, 1963
Died: July 16, 2023
Quotes count: 123

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