Kevin Mitnick Quotes

My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.

As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.

At the end of the day, my goal was to be the best hacker.

The one thing that I know from the personal experiences that I've had with hackers and from people in tech who are brilliant at this thing, is there's a lot of angst.

I don't hate technology, I don't hate hackers, because that's just what comes with it, without those hackers we wouldn't solve the problems we need to solve, especially security.

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

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

It's kind of interesting, because hacking is a skill that could be used for criminal purposes or legitimate purposes, and so even though in the past I was hacking for the curiosity, and the thrill, to get a bite of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, I'm now working in the security field as a public speaker.

Cybersecurity is a new issue for the international community at large. First of all, the technologies are new and the attacks are invisible. Traditionally, if you perceived a threat, it could be seen. It was physical. But not in cyberspace.

To see a hacker actually hacking is not the most interesting thing visually, and it's pretty boring as an actor: a hacker taps on her keyboard. There's really not much more than that.

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.

I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.

Technology breeds crime and we are constantly trying to develop technology to stay one step ahead of the person trying to use it negatively.

Governments are scared of software.

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.

The FBI is engaged in a myriad of efforts to combat cyber threats, from efforts focused on threat identification and sharing inside and outside of government, to our internal emphasis on developing and retaining new talent and changing the way we operate to evolve with the cyber threat.

I don't condone anyone causing damage in my name, or doing anything malicious in support of my plight. There are more productive ways to help me. As a hacker myself, I never intentionally damaged anything.

If you don't treat [computer and Internet] security like a religious fanatic, you are going to be hurt like you can't imagine.

There is no data base that is totally secure. The hackers are always one step ahead and have a vested interest in obtaining the data.

Deterrence is … a weak tool in the increasingly important realm of cyberspace, where it can be extremely difficult to be absolutely sure of an attacker’s identity.

The next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack.

As our use of technologies grows exponentially, so do our country's vulnerabilities. Our national security depends on the stability and reliability of our communications infrastructure. The cyber threat to IT and national security systems has never been greater.

You fight technology with technology, so you have to stay one step ahead of the criminal. It's very much a chess game - they make a move, you have to make a move.

Organized crime and rogue nation states and terrorists are very much focused on the Internet of things. The challenge that goes with connectivity is always security. The bad guys go wherever the return is, and now it's more lucrative for bad guys to focus on cybercrime than traditional crime.

The Internet is a worldwide platform for sharing information. It is a community of common interests. No country is immune to such global challenges as cybercrime, hacking, and invasion of privacy.