When I was in prison, a Colombian drug lord, offered me $5 million in cash to manipulate a computer system so that he would be released. I turned him down.
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.
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.
I was pretty much the government’s poster boy for what I had done.
The human. Now you know all about your target.
You can’t go to Windows Update and get a patch for stupidity.
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.
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.
A hacker doesnt deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.
Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.
I did get a huge endorphin rush when I was able to crack a system because it was like a video game.
I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I’m applying what I know to improve security at companies.
So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.
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.
My argument is not that I shouldn’t have been punished, but that the punishment didn’t fit the crime.
My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.
We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.
So the ethic I was taught in school resulted in the path I chose in my life following school.
I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.
Of course I’m sure half the people there hate me and half the people like me.
The intent of the individuals who created the DDoS attacks has nothing to do with hacking, and they are vandals, not hackers.