Ethical Hacking Quotes

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

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.

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.

My hacking was all about becoming the best at circumventing security. So when I was a fugitive, I worked systems administrator jobs to make money. I wasn't stealing money or using other people's credit cards. I was doing a 9-to-5 job.

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

Is hacking ever acceptable? It depends on the motive.

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

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.

I was one of the first practitioners of social engineering as a hacking technique, and today it is my only tool of use, aside from a smartphone - in a purely white hat sort of way. But if you don't trust me, then ask any reasonably competent social engineer.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage.

A hacker doesn't deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities.

Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.

I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to get at that information,” said Leslie. “Don’t look,” said Goldstein, peering over Charles’s shoulder. “We don’t know anything about illegal hacking.” He whistled cheerily.

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

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.

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.

Gray hats are the ones who think they're doing good, but they're not. You learn that when the FBI shows up on your doorstep.

The criminal justice system - although this applies less to the U.S., where rehabilitation is not seen as a valuable contribution to criminal justice - in Europe where rehab is supposed to be integral, we have no way of rehabilitating skilled hackers. On the contrary what we do is we demonize them and continue to do so after they come out of jail because we restrict their access to computers by law. Crazy world, crazy people.

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

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.

Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves.

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