Kevin Mitnick Quotes

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.

Leaking of classified material is a concern.

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.

I went from being a kid who loved to perform magic tricks to becoming the world's most notorious hacker, feared by corporations and the government.

Every case involving cybercrime that I've been involved in, I've never found a master criminal sitting somewhere in Russia or Hong Kong or Beijing. It always ends up that somebody at the company did something they weren't supposed to do. They read an email, went to a website they weren't supposed to.

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.

I support safeguarding users' personally identifiable information and sensitive data like health or financial records. I also believe the government has a responsibility to punish deceptive and unfair practices that defy reasonable expectations about consumers' privacy.

When an attacker fails with one person, they often go to another person. The key is to report the attack to other departments. Workers should know to act like they are going along with what the hacker wants and take copious notes so the company will know what the hacker is trying to find.

If hackers, if anyone committing a criminal act, wants to reduce their risk, they obviously don't involve anybody else. The greater the circle of people that know what you're doing, the higher the risk.

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

What good does it do to spend millions to protect ourselves against espionage if our secrets just leak away.

A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of classified or sensitive information that is improper under any circumstance.

Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record, and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.

The consequences of leaking sensitive information is that Americans and coalition forces die, and we lose trust with foreign spies, and our national security is put at risk.

October 7th [2016], indeed, WikiLeaks released its whole new dump. A whole new bunch of e-mails and documents, this time from [Hillary] Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, e-mails that U.S. intelligence say were hacked by Russia. Apparently, again, they were waiting for the best possible timing on the release.

The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works

I hope that this [hacking] does not continue to be viewed purely through a partisan lens.I think there are Republicans as well as Democrats who are concerned about this.

Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.

The scope of our cybersecurity problem is enormous. Our government, our businesses, our trade secrets and our citizens' most sensitive information are all facing constant cyberattacks and reviews by the enemy.

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.

If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.

Hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them.

Let's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works.

What's really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet.

I am troubled... that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation's most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001.