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.
We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.
It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.
The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.
The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.
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