Exploit Development Quotes

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

Second issue is the rapidly accelerating increase in the number of vulnerabilities that get discovered every day. And, equally importantly, is the shortening of time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the release of an exploit.

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

Attackers are able to amortize the cost of exploit, malware, and infrastructure development across many targets.

A zero-day exploit is a method of hacking a system. It's sort of a vulnerability that has an exploit written for it, sort of a key and a lock that go together to a given software package. It could be an internet web server. It could be Microsoft Office. It could be Adobe Reader or it could be Facebook.

When you're attacking a router on the internet, and you're doing it remotely, it's like trying to shoot the moon with a rifle. Everything has to happen exactly right. Every single variable has to be controlled and precisely accounted for. And that's not possible to do when you have limited knowledge of the target you're attacking.

I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

People have to be free to investigate computer security. People have to be free to look for the vulnerabilities and create proof of concept code to show that they are true vulnerabilities in order for us to secure our systems.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them.

It's more than unsettling to realize there are large companies out there developing backdoors, exploits and trojans.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

If the United States is promoting the development of exploits, of vulnerabilities, of insecurity in this critical infrastructure, and we're not fixing it when we find it, instead we put it on the shelf so we can use it the next time we want to launch an attack against some foreign country. We're leaving ourselves at risk.