Kevin Mitnick Quotes

I was an accomplished computer trespasser. I don't consider myself a thief.

For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was an accomplished computer trespasser. I don't consider myself a thief. I copied without permission.

Then again, my case was all about the misappropriation of source code because I wanted to become the best hacker in the world and I enjoyed beating the security mechanisms.

If you're a juvenile delinquent today, you're a hacker. You live in your parent's house; they haven't seen you for two months. They put food outside your door, and you're shutting down a government of a foreign country from your computer.

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

I think some of the most interesting stuff was seeing how the Dark Web works and seeing how easy it is for hackers to break into your computer or your bank account or your private information.

People are running huge enterprises off of hacking and stealing data.

Shutting down governments on your computer is just as much as fun as going to a riot at Yale.

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people's privacy. But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

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.

It's actually a smarter crime because imagine if you rob a bank, or you're dealing drugs. If you get caught you're going to spend a lot of time in custody. But with hacking, it's much easier to commit the crime and the risk of punishment is slim to none.

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.

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.

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.

I saw myself as an electronic joy rider. I was like James Bond behind the computer. I was just having a blast.

The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.