I don't condone anyone causing damage in my name, or doing anything malicious in support of my plight. There are more productive ways to help me. As a hacker myself, I never intentionally damaged anything.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of ethical behavior and constructive action rather than destructive actions in the name of a cause.
Kevin Mitnick expresses his belief that being affiliated with a cause should not justify harmful or malicious actions. As a hacker, he values creativity and constructive solutions over damage, advocating for a more ethical approach to problems rather than resorting to negativity.
In practice
During a tech conference, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of ethical practices in hacking.
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.
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.
Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.
Most people assume that once security software is installed, they're protected. This isn't the case. It's critical that companies be proactive in thinking about security on a long-term basis.
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'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.
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.
We often hear people talk about the concept of 'uberization,' where a new technology completely turns an industry on its head and forces us to rethink the way things have always been done. No industry will remain untouched by these forces.
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.
There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.
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