Steve McConnell Quotes

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.

National security always matters, obviously. But the reality is that if you have an open door in your software for the good guys, the bad guys get in there, too.

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

I'd be the first to say that cybersecurity is a difficult and challenging matter.

What happens with smaller businesses is that they give in to the misconception that their site is secure because the system administrator deployed standard security products - firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or stronger authentication devices such as time-based tokens or biometric smart cards. But those things can be exploited.

I get hired by companies to hack into their systems and break into their physical facilities to find security holes. Our success rate is 100%; we've always found a hole.

I don't know the capabilities of our enemies. But I found it quite easy to circumvent security at certain phone companies throughout the United States. So if an inquisitive kid can do it, why can't a cyberterrorist do it?

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.

A lot of individuals out there carry a lot of proprietary information on their mobile devices, and they're not protected. It's a very target-rich environment.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

Hacking is exploiting security controls either in a technical, physical or a human-based element.

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.

I think malware is a significant threat because the mitigation, like antivirus software, hasn't evolved to a point to really mitigate the risk to a reasonable degree.

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

If I needed to know about a security exploit, I preferred to get the information by accessing the companies' security teams' files, rather than poring over lines of code to find it on my own. It's just more efficient.

We are increasingly dependent on these electronic infrastructures. As technology advances we are more vulnerable.

Nobody should be too boastful or too proud about their security because there are people who have a major interest in cracking the security of networks, the security of companies.

There is no secure data center in the world; they have all been broken into. We can help you prepare for it and minimize the damage when it does occur.

Hackers rarely have full knowledge of the technology stack of a target.

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history... The real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.

If the leaks continue, we are strong as our weakest link. And I'll say it a little differently in a pun. We're strong as our weakest leak.

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.