Kevin Mitnick Quotes

I have never witnessed, nor will I live long enough to witness, a more simplistic crime than me stealing your identity.

Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the nation - especially in the suburbs.

There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible.

But I'm acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today's world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.

Interconnectivity on the Internet with all people means interconnectivity with the evil people

I woke up one morning to an email from my friend Alex that said she'd had her bag stolen. Ordinarily, I'm quite quick on the uptake, but - maybe because of the way it was worded - I immediately replied, 'What??????' As soon as I hit send, I realised I was being scammed. But then they replied, and I thought, 'Well, why not?'

'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.

I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.

Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans each year.

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.

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

Every portal coming into this country is being attacked by those who would harvest information, both national security secrets and just the common information of private individuals and private individuals. That crime is going on, every day, on a single entity known as the Internet.

If you happen to tell me where you were born, your date of birth and that kind of information, then I'm 98 percent of the way to stealing your identity.

In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started. If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today, but we might not have even got there.

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

If you tell me your name and date of birth, that's all I need to steal your identity.

To be clear, any attempt to hack or to do anything nefarious is wrong and illegal.

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 is amazing the information we give away. We make it easier and easier for criminals.

Cyberterrorism has become an increasingly prevalent and serious threat here in America, both to individuals and businesses.

Some of the best scams that you get are the ones that pretend to come from friends of yours, because you can just say anything you want, because a scammer has no idea about your relationship with that person.

Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.

By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that's just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers - a deception epidemic.

Most hacking incidents that you see are freelancers - maybe government sponsored, maybe not. They are out there trying to steal intellectual property, make some money. Or they might just be hackers who want to damage something for whatever reason. That's a fact of life that internet companies deal with all the time.