Kevin Mitnick Quotes
I'm still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.
Mitnick, Kevin. Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Many computer experts and security operatives view this kind of advice and strategy as counter-productive as there are some computer security extremists who so harden computer systems and networks that they function poorly and cause really harmful operational problems. The classic case was the FBI agent in Minnesota who before 9-11 had information that Muslims foreigners were taking flying lessons. She wanted to get the information to the national security FBI people, but she was not allowed to send the information by e-mail. Instead she had to use a "secure" system that was much slower and could not be viewed by the people who might have been able to connect the dots and do something about it. The FBI has now a better balance between functionality and security, but it is a good example of how "security fanaticism" can make us less safe.
Ironically, it was the case that there was even more hacking that was motivated by people who just wanted to prove that they could ‘breach a system’ and the more an organization claims that its data is secure, the more motivation there is for these hackers to demonstrate their prowess.
At the time this quotation was created, the Chinese hacking had done no harm in the sense that they did not destroy the data in any of our computers or render some computers non-operational. We actually had done that and more – using hacking to affect destroy part of an Iranian nuclear fuel processing facility, but we had never done that to China, nor had China to us. A difference that outraged some Americans is that they viewed it as “fair game” to do espionage on military and political secrets. The Chinese however, in addition to that, did much industrial spying on American commercial innovations and manufacturing techniques. The French and the South Koreans, however, had been doing this for years, and American politicians were careful not to make a public issue about it and try to minimize it with diplomacy. However, all this makes a solution hard to come by as Liebenthal explained in his quotation.
The FBI had obtained a court order requiring apple to write software that could hack into a person's iPhone. Apple, with most other hi-tech companies in support, filed a motion with the court opposing the order. The FBI shortly thereafter withdrew its request for the order saying that they had found other solutions, when they had originally told the court that there were no other solutions.
Kevin David Mitnick is an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile 1995 arrest and five years in prison for various computer and communications-related crimes.
