Bruce Schneier Quotes

Social engineering is using deception, manipulation and influence to convince a human who has access to a computer system to do something, like click on an attachment in an e-mail.

Psychochemical warfare has the advantage of avoiding the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.

The methods that will most effectively minimize the ability of intruders to compromise information security are comprehensive user training and education. Enacting policies and procedures simply won't suffice. Even with oversight the policies and procedures may not be effective: my access to Motorola, Nokia, ATT, Sun depended upon the willingness of people to bypass policies and procedures that were in place for years before I compromised them successfully.

People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems.

Living in this manner also gave them the opportunity to locate targets and develop methods of attack that would make the most impact on the population, infrastructure, and governments of these areas.

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

We should not conduct a war of nerves to achieve strategic ends.

No military tactic is unreasonable if it can further destroy enemy morale and quickly.

The combat man isn't the same clean-cut lad because you don't fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you.

The Fuehrer is not just a lunatic. The weapons in his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated. His control of the people is technologically clever. He has torn up the military textbook, and written his own.

We reserve the right to respond to any act of the adversary at a time and place of our choosing.

There is no technology today that cannot be defeated by social engineering.

I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way.

I taught at the FBI for four decades - how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

The information weapon, of course, is used in critical moments, and war is always a critical moment.

Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.

We live in a world where all wars will begin as cyber wars... It's the combination of hacking and massive, well-coordinated disinformation campaigns.

Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don't exclude myself from that. It's about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.

The drones are a terrorist weapon, they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.

People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.

Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he's lost the battle.

When we talk about carpet bombing ISIL, that's what it looks like, creating huge numbers of civilian casualties, which increases the numbers of refugees flowing out of the region, which increases the misery of the Syrian people.

I have studied the enemy all my life. I have read the memoirs of his generals and his leaders. I have even read his philosophers and listened to his music. I have studied in detail the account of every damned one of his battles. I know exactly how he will react under any given set of circumstances. And he hasn't the slightest idea of what I'm going to do. So when the time comes, I'm going to whip the hell out of him.

Every decision in government is so important, especially when it comes to the military where thousands of people can lose their lives.