Kevin Mitnick

Businessman

1963-08-06

Quotes by Kevin Mitnick

• 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.

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• The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.

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• Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker.

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• 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.

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• I use Spam Arrest because of the amount of junk mail I get. Any legitimate person who wants to send me a message has to jump through hoops before they can be added to my opt-in list.

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• Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

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• Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.

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• Phone phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees.

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• The perfect PIN is not four digits and not associated with your life, like an old telephone number. It's something easy for you to remember and hard for other people to guess.

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• I was an accomplished computer trespasser. I don't consider myself a thief.

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• Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business.

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• To have transactions made on your web site via credit card, you must be PCI compliant. Businesses make the mistake of thinking that because you passed the requirements and are PCI certified, you are immune to attacks.

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• People are prone to taking mental shortcuts. They may know that they shouldn't give out certain information, but the fear of not being nice, the fear of appearing ignorant, the fear of a perceived authority figure - all these are triggers, which can be used by a social engineer to convince a person to override established security procedures.

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• My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.

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• I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access.

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• 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.

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• I keep my stuff updated all the time. Being in the security industry, I keep up to date with securities.

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• When somebody asks for a favor involving information, if you don't know him or can't verify his identity, just say no.

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• The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.

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• I got so passionate about technology. Hacking to me was like a video game. It was about getting trophies. I just kept going on and on, despite all the trouble I was getting into, because I was hooked.

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