Top 60 Kevin Mitnick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.”

— Kevin Mitnick

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2. “There is no patch for stupidity.”

— Kevin Mitnick

3. “I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.”

— Kevin Mitnick

4. “My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.”

— Kevin Mitnick

5. “You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect your self as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.”

— Kevin Mitnick

6. “You can’t go to Windows Update and get a patch for stupidity.”

— Kevin Mitnick

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7. “As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.”

— Kevin Mitnick

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8. “Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls and secure access devices, and it’s money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer and operate computer systems.”

— Kevin Mitnick

9. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

10. “Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!”

— Kevin Mitnick

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

— Kevin Mitnick

12. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

13. “The human. Now you know all about your target.”

— Kevin Mitnick

14. “I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it’s actually easier than it was years ago.”

— Kevin Mitnick

15. “Of course I’m sure half the people there hate me and half the people like me.”

— Kevin Mitnick

16. “The intent of the individuals who created the DDoS attacks has nothing to do with hacking, and they are vandals, not hackers.”

— Kevin Mitnick

17. “New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing.”

— Kevin Mitnick

18. “I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I’m applying what I know to improve security at companies.”

— Kevin Mitnick

19. “The hacker mindset doesn’t actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.”

— Kevin Mitnick

20. “Some people think technology has the answers.”

— Kevin Mitnick

21. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

22. “It’s true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker.”

— Kevin Mitnick

23. “If you go to a coffee shop or at the airport, and you’re using open wireless, I would use a VPN service that you could subscribe for 10 bucks a month. Everything is encrypted in an encryption tunnel, so a hacker cannot tamper with your connection.”

— Kevin Mitnick

24. “Social engineers veil themselves in a cloak of believability.”

— Kevin Mitnick

25. “I trust online banking. You know why? Because if somebody hacks into my account and defrauds my credit card company, or my online bank account, guess who takes the loss? The bank, not me.”

— Kevin Mitnick

26. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

27. “Oracle, for example, has even hired people to dumpster dive for information about its competitor, Microsoft. It’s not even illegal, because trash isn’t covered by data secrecy laws.”

— Kevin Mitnick

28. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

29. “I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.”

— Kevin Mitnick

30. “Security is always going to be a cat and mouse game because there’ll be people out there that are hunting for the zero day award, you have people that don’t have configuration management, don’t have vulnerability management, don’t have patch management.”

— Kevin Mitnick

31. “Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company’s internal jargon.”

— Kevin Mitnick

32. “We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.”

— Kevin Mitnick

33. “My argument is not that I shouldn’t have been punished, but that the punishment didn’t fit the crime.”

— Kevin Mitnick

34. “For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.”

— Kevin Mitnick

35. “It’s actually a smarter crime because imagine if you rob a bank, or you’re dealing drugs. If you get caught you’re going to spend a lot of time in custody. But with hacking, it’s much easier to commit the crime and the risk of punishment is slim to none.”

— Kevin Mitnick

36. “Both social engineering and technical attacks played a big part in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when it was appropriate, and exploited technical vulnerabilities when it was appropriate.”

— Kevin Mitnick

37. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

38. “I’m still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.”

— Kevin Mitnick

39. “I believe in having each device secured and monitoring each device, rather than just monitoring holistically on the network, and then responding in short enough time for damage control.”

— Kevin Mitnick

40. “Any type of operating system that I wanted to be able to hack, I basically compromised the source code, copied it over to the university because I didn’t have enough space on my 200 megabyte hard drive.”

— Kevin Mitnick

41. “When an attacker fails with one person, they often go to another person. The key is to report the attack to other departments. Workers should know to act like they are going along with what the hacker wants and take copious notes so the company will know what the hacker is trying to find.”

— Kevin Mitnick

42. “But a lot of businesses out there don’t see the return on investment, they look at it as a liability, and until they can understand that proactive security actually returns, gives them a return on investment, it’s still a hard sell for people.”

— Kevin Mitnick

43. “A hacker doesnt deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.”

— Kevin Mitnick

44. “Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.”

— Kevin Mitnick

45. “It was used for decades to describe talented computer enthusiasts, people whose skill at using computers to solve technical problems and puzzles was – and is – respected and admired by others possessing similar technical skills.”

— Kevin Mitnick

46. “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.”

— Kevin Mitnick

47. “All they need to do is to set up some website somewhere selling some bogus product at twenty percent of the normal market prices and people are going to be tricked into providing their credit card numbers.”

— Kevin Mitnick

48. “I made stupid decisions as a kid, or as a young adult, but I’m trying to be now, I’m trying to take this lemon and make lemonade.”

— Kevin Mitnick

49. “I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.”

— Kevin Mitnick

50. “Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause.”

— Kevin Mitnick