Eric S. Raymond Quotes

I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

I've never really been associated with the hackers very much. I am sympathetic to them. I understand how their mind works. It's like a child that is born and wants to explore every little - open up every little drawer there is and find out how the world works.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

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.

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

It's kind of interesting, because hacking is a skill that could be used for criminal purposes or legitimate purposes, and so even though in the past I was hacking for the curiosity, and the thrill, to get a bite of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, I'm now working in the security field as a public speaker.

At the end of the day, my goal was to be the best hacker.

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

I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years. But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.

If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked.

With hacking getting more and more sophisticated, the hacking community has gone from the hobbyist in the basement to huge sophisticated companies that are essentially doing this, or groups of people or foreign agents inside and outside the United States.

When you're attacking a router on the internet, and you're doing it remotely, it's like trying to shoot the moon with a rifle. Everything has to happen exactly right. Every single variable has to be controlled and precisely accounted for. And that's not possible to do when you have limited knowledge of the target you're attacking.

Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.

Hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

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.

I don't hate technology, I don't hate hackers, because that's just what comes with it, without those hackers we wouldn't solve the problems we need to solve, especially security.

Pictures get manipulated, pictures get dropped into accounts. We've asked an internet security firm and a law firm to take a hard look at this to come up with a conclusion about what happened and to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Deterrence is … a weak tool in the increasingly important realm of cyberspace, where it can be extremely difficult to be absolutely sure of an attacker’s identity.

I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.

The first step in securing our cyber future is education, and that means everything from educating individuals to companies to the next generation of IT professionals.

If there's a cyberattack from China or Russia or Romania or Mexico, it may well run through a server in another country. And it may take months before you know where it really came from.