Kevin Mitnick Quotes

Somebody could send you an office document or a PDF file, and as soon as you open it, it's a booby trap and the hacker has complete control of your computer. Another major problem is password management. People use the same password on multiple sites, so when the hacker compromises one site, they have your password for everywhere else.

Social engineering has become about 75% of an average hacker's toolkit, and for the most successful hackers, it reaches 90% or more.

'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.

If you don't understand viruses, phishing, and similar threats, you become more susceptible to them. If you don't know how social networks leak information that you thought was private, you're likely to reveal much more than you realize.

It is a fairly open secret that almost all systems can be hacked, somehow. It is a less spoken of secret that such hacking has actually gone quite mainstream.

There are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.

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.

Both social engineering and technical attacks played a big part in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when it was appropriate, and exploited technical vulnerabilities when it was appropriate.

U.S. computer networks and databases are under daily cyber attack by nation states, international crime organizations, subnational groups, and individual hackers.

Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.

The very promise of safety [digital security] is iresistable temptation to hackers, the invading hordes of the 21st century.

Nobody should be too boastful or too proud about their security because there are people who have a major interest in cracking the security of networks, the security of companies.

When hackers have access to powerful computers that use brute force hacking, they can crack almost any password; even one user with insecure access being successfully hacked can result in a major breach.

A simple social engineering hack might involve leaving a thumb drive on the pavement close to the driver's door of a car.

When Target gets hacked, I don't hear people saying, 'Hey, was it Kohl's? Was it Wal-Mart?' It doesn't matter. There was a hack; you deal with it.

Today, we face another major potential attack on our country. This attack is not a hijacked plane or bomb, although that remains a threat; rather, it is a cyber attack.

A hacker is someone who uses a combination of high-tech cybertools and social engineering to gain illicit access to someone else's data.

If nothing else, the cyber attacks that occurred during the 2016 presidential election have laid bare the very real vulnerabilities that exist across our government and the private sector. Imagine the harm that could be done if our enemies ever hack into the Department of Defense or Homeland Security.

A lot of individuals have had their personal information compromised, and then we've seen just about every corporation in this country hacked or attempted to be hacked by foreign countries.

It's sad that people will invade someone's privacy - and this is not only regarding someone's private photos - but this goes deep into people's financial privacy, their passwords, their emails, their text messages.

It may be well possible that phished passwords ended up being used at Sci-Hub. I did not send any phishing emails to anyone myself. The exact source of the passwords was never personally important to me.

Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it.

Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don't exclude myself from that. It's about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.

Technology businesses in general are susceptible to hacking. That's why you have to work really, really, really hard with law enforcement, with security experts, internal and external groups, to make sure you're paying attention and addressing security concerns.

As the United States attorney in Manhattan, I have come to worry about few things as much as the gathering cyber threat.