Kevin Mitnick Quotes

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.

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

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.

There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.

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.

My hacking was all about becoming the best at circumventing security. So when I was a fugitive, I worked systems administrator jobs to make money. I wasn't stealing money or using other people's credit cards. I was doing a 9-to-5 job.

I'm a bit of a hacker fanatic and know a fair bit about that industry and cyber crime and cyber warfare.

Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.

I was hooked in before hacking was even illegal.

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

I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage.

Gray hats are the ones who think they're doing good, but they're not. You learn that when the FBI shows up on your doorstep.

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.

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

Hacking was the only entertainment that would occupy my mind - like a huge video game, but with real consequences. I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.

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

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.

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.

I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.

Unfortunately cybercrime is the crime of our generation.

I've never really been associated with the hackers very much. I am sympathetic to them. I understand how their mind works. It's like a child that is born and wants to explore every little - open up every little drawer there is and find out how the world works.

Mostly, cybercriminals are motivated to commit crime for financial gain.

It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.

I contend that there really are no more con men. There's no need for con men anymore. There's no need for the very sophisticated, suave guy, the well-dressed guy. Today, you steal with the computer from thousands of miles away - from China, from Libya, from Hong Kong. Your victim's never going to see you, so there's no need to be any of that.

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.