Ken Xie Quotes

I've always shied away from online data storage. I don't even use my employers' network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself.

When a hacker gains access to any corporate data, the value of that data depends on which server, or sometimes a single person's computer, that the hacker gains access to.

Our nation's vital infrastructure - such as power grids and transportation hubs - becomes more vulnerable when individual devices get hacked. Criminals and terrorists who want to infiltrate systems and disrupt sensitive networks may start their attacks through access to just one person's smartphone.

In computer circles, any unencrypted data is known as 'cleartext.'

Penetrating a company's security often starts with the bad guy obtaining some piece of information that seems so innocent, so everyday and unimportant, that most people in the organization don't see any reason why the item should be protected and restricted.

Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses and exploit them to gain access to your most sensitive secrets.

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.

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else's hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.

There is no data base that is totally secure. The hackers are always one step ahead and have a vested interest in obtaining the data.

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.

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.

Everything becomes connected, and cyber security becomes the top issue for CEOs. An average company has 40-60 security vendors, and they have a violation every three months with viruses.

I am convinced that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be. And even they are converging into one category: companies that have been hacked and will be hacked again.

When the Internet was first - as an experiment and then when it - as it mushroomed, security was never an integral part of what the Internet was designed for. I mean, it just didn't - wasn't a consideration.

There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked.

If a serious and sophisticated attacker has enough time he or she will get into a digital network. Governments and private corporations need to be able to detect an attacker on their network quickly, quarantine him completely and then kick him off.

I think every organization needs to assume that they are compromised.

With the evolution of information technology, there have emerged new questions, for example, of data and privacy.

As much as we can, we want to prevent people from having to think about how to keep and share their stuff.

First, our focus on security is on the infrastructure itself. So it is all about how you protect the network, the device, and the application that is riding on the server.

Technology businesses in general are susceptible to hacking. That's why you have to work really, really, really hard with law enforcement, with security experts, internal and external groups, to make sure you're paying attention and addressing security concerns.

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many.

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.

Advances in technology - hugely beneficial though they are - render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.