Quotes & Sayings About Hackers

Service disruptions have to be avoided or at least resolved as quickly as possible. When the Internet goes down, consumers don't notice the difference between a technical malfunction, an act of sabotage by hackers or a military attack. — Thomas De Maiziere

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map. — Larry Wall

A utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers. — Brian Christian

To guys like Mark, time was another weapon of the establishment, like alphabetical order. The great engineers, hackers - they didn't function under the same time constraints as everyone else. — Ben Mezrich

Dear 2600: Tell me how much one of your hackers would charge me to delete my criminal record from the Texas police database.
[NAME DELETED] Well, we would start with erasing your latest crime, that of soliciting a minor to commit another crime. (Your request was read by a small child here in the office.) After you're all paid up on that, we will send out the bill for hiding your identity by not printing your real name, which you sent us like the meathead you apparently are. After that's all sorted, we can assemble our team of hackers, who sit around the office waiting for such lucrative opportunities as this to come along, and figure out even more ways to shake you down. It's what we do, after all. Just ask Fox News. — Emmanuel Goldstein

The hackers don't want to destroy the network. They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it. — Vinton Cerf

Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before, it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill, and now hacking is big business. — Kevin Mitnick

Dear 2600: Please help me to learn how to become an elite one day.
The first thing to learn is never to use the word elite as a noun. In fact, don't even use it as an adjective. It's radically lame. — Emmanuel Goldstein

U.S. computer networks and databases are under daily cyber attack by nation states, international crime organizations, subnational groups, and individual hackers. — John O. Brennan

Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion. — Kevin Mitnick

We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, global cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas - things of incredible value to all of us. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy. — James Comey

The intent of the individuals who created the DDoS attacks has nothing to do with hacking, and they are vandals, not hackers. — Kevin Mitnick

In the hacking world, security is more of a response than a proactive measure. They wait for hackers to attack and then they patch, based on the attacks. — Michael Demon Calce

These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as "product marketing professionals," "growth hackers," "creative rockstar interns," and "public speakers. — Dan Lyons

the Feds had also found Netcom's customer database that contained more than 20,000 credit card numbers on my computer, but I had never attempted to use any of them; no prosecutor would ever be able to make a case against me on that score. I have to admit, I had liked the idea that I could use a different credit card every day for the rest of my life without ever running out. But I'd never had any intention of running up charges on them, and never did. That would be wrong. My trophy was a copy of Netcom's customer database. Why is that so hard to understand? Hackers and gamers get it instinctively. Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it's enough to defeat your opponent. You don't have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile. — Kevin D. Mitnick

If you wanna know how not secure you are, just take a look around. Nothing's secure. Nothing's safe. 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. — Fred Durst

I love being a businessman much more than being a hacker. — Kim Dotcom

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don't take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don't like. They seek to outsmart the world. — Sarah Lacy

it is quite disturbing to know that anyone can look at what we are doing online at any given moment. There are millions and millions of other people using the internet who choose not to take special precautions. Without taking the extra step to protect your online activities, anyone from the NSA, FBI, and general hackers can see what you search while on the internet. One — Evan Lane

If hackers, if anyone committing a criminal act, wants to reduce their risk, they obviously don't involve anybody else. The greater the circle of people that know what you're doing, the higher the risk. — Kevin Mitnick

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away. — Esther Dyson

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. — Steve Wozniak

Be very careful. We suggest getting a book on HTML to avoid becoming a real legend in the hacker world. Putting up a web page before you know how to put up a web page is generally a very bad idea. The .gov sites are an exception. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Nd the reason is is if you put a backdoor in, hackers can presumably get a hold of that backdoor as well and break it open. So you make systems less secure for everyone if you do that. — Rod Beckstrom

New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing. — Kevin Mitnick

Corporate secrets bouncing around a computer system thats open to the world? Hey, that's fair game and they deserve the embarrassment of its discovery. But using this knowledge to line your pockets or, worse, using insider knowledge to get the information and then calling that hacking is an affront to any of us who hack for the sake of learning. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Dear 2600: ... So, in the interest of information gathering and because I am a subscriber, are you going to be checking me out?
This would be unnecessary since we checked you out before you subscribed. That's why we made sure you heard about us and followed the plan by subscribing. Writing this letter, however, was not part of the plan and we will be taking corrective action. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. — Paul Graham

Hackers rarely have full knowledge of the technology stack of a target. — John McAfee

I think the thing that our government lacks - just about more than anything else - is technological competence. We have some of the greatest white-hat hackers in the world here in the U.S., but the government seems to be technologically illiterate. — John McAfee

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let's find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don't know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can't communicate openly, there's not much there to salvage. — Emmanuel Goldstein

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers. — Eric S. Raymond

As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing. — Evgeny Morozov

This is our world now The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. — Loyd Blankenship

Dear 2600: OK I have some real serious stuff to tell but I need to be reassured that I can trust your company that you don't do this sorta thing just so you can turn people in then I will tell my very serious and true story for you but I must be reassured first please reply. ANONYMOUS
How can we lie to you? We published 2600 for 16 years just so you would finally walk into our little trap. Welcome. — Emmanuel Goldstein

No one messes around with a nerd's computer and escapes unscathed. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. — Paul Graham

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature — Eric S. Raymond

Almost every PC owner has lost a weekend sorting through the debris of worms, viruses, spyware, and broken permissions. Since Windows was originally created in the pre-Internet days, programmers didn't worry about closing holes in the operating system. Unfortunately, hackers and spammers could easily exploit these vulnerabilities. While security continues to improve with each new release, the Windows operating system is still based on a pre-Internet model, which is prone to viruses. Mac OS X was created only a few years ago with ultimate security and stability. There are no known Mac OS X viruses, and Windows Word Macros (a common home to threats) — Hunter Travis

Humans make mistakes. Programmers are bound to make mistakes. Hackers, you can bet your life, are going to be there to exploit those mistakes. — Michael Demon Calce

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. "My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish," he said. "I didn't want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help."136 — Walter Isaacson

the hackers realizes which one is which. As a political statement, the hacker changes the amount of fluoride flowing into the drinking water. He plans to do this for only a few minutes. Almost immediately, lightning strikes a phone pedestal a mile down the road. The DSL line the hacker is using "goes dark". Panic finds its way across the hacker's face as he realizes he just murdered over a thousand people with fluoride poisoning. — Jeremy Martin

My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers. — Bre Pettis

Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); — Ryan Holiday

Where there's a will, there's a way. Hackers tend to find a way. Code is also expanding. More lines of code means more probability that there is an exploit that can be [used]. — Michael Demon Calce

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. — David Lagercrantz

People are hard to be understand, full of lies, full of corupt, if you want a friendship with them is like to have a friendship with nothing. But nothing isn't a possibility of the ability, people you can go 40....50 years studying them and what you will find is that you are old and they are new and more and more stupid. I find somebody who can I trust, it's my computer who else???
It's too clever, I need to hang out with clever people not with idiots! — Deyth Banger

There's beauty in people who reinvent themselves. Actors live a thousand lives, as do hackers ... the personality can play around forever. — Shia Labeouf

The hackers who hacked into Sony have leaked the upcoming script for the new James Bond movie. Some of the executives said the news left them shaken but not stirred. — Conan O'Brien

Dear 2600: I need someone with the abilities to get into my school server and change a few things. I have saved up $3500 over the past year for this and am willing to pay it in cash, as I am from the Winnipeg area.
Desperate doesnt begin to cover it. Whatever your problems, and we certainly wont try to minimize them, they are nothing compared to the world of hurt you'll enter if you do stupid things like offer complete strangers money to help you do illegal things ... ..There should be something in your genetic code that alerts you to the fact that you're doing something extremely stupid and wrong. So we're clear, the offer was in Canadian dollars and not American, right? — Emmanuel Goldstein

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. — Eric S. Raymond

You're allowed to want different things in bed than you do in your normal everyday life. — Meredith Wild

It's less about technology for me, and more about religion. [on hacking] — Adrian Lamo

Our civilization is facing a radical, imminent mass change. The alternative to the hierarchical power structure is based on mutual aid and group consensus. As hackers we can learn these systems, manipulate these systems, and shut down these systems if we need to. — Jeremy Hammond

Dirck took a deep breath, refusing to believe what he'd seen as he exited to the core system, so rattled he almost logged out directly but caught himself just in time, instituting another surge of panic at what the consequences would have been. — Marcha A. Fox

I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus. — Jasper Fforde

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. — Mark Zuckerberg

Proximity to the device tempted him, a muted siren's call to undress, open the coffin-like lid and climb into the lukewarm saline solution, to plug his interface jack in, sheathe his genitals in the waste catch and sink down into the glorious rush of jacking in. He missed the freefall adrenaline of consciousness translated into pure data, of his body rendered in liquid mercury, shifting and changing with his every thought. He missed the thrill of cracking databank security, of running from anti-intrusion software and other hackers. — Gary A. Ballard

I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails. — Andrew Lawrence

So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care. — Neal Stephenson

There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes. — Edward Snowden

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving. — Heather Brooke

I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States' digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments. — Rebecca MacKinnon

It is not just software glitches and corrupted memory cards that should be on the minds of election officials. Hackers pose another very real problem whereby an election could be tilted towards a favored candidate. — Bob Barr

Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause. — Kevin Mitnick

There was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn't seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.
"What on earth is that?"
"That's my Kung Fu," he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.
"Is that what you wanted to show me?"
"No, but it's impressive, isn't it?"
"If you say so."
Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device. — E.A. Bucchianeri

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student. — Paul Graham

Hackers are nerdy, pasty, tubby, little geeks with triple thick glasses and this is probably a demented otaku with smelly feet. So catching him will be a breeze! — Keiko Nobumoto

In the aftermath of the oh-so-predictable crash, the Bitcoin fanatics have begun marshaling out excuse after excuse for why this non-investment investment lost so much of its value so fast. One was that hackers attacked some of the exchanges for Bitcoins and crippled it. Really? A hacker can wreck an entire market? — Kurt Eichenwald

I am not a wishing well with legs.
(Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.) — Adrian Lamo

As the world becomes more digitalized, there are more entry points for hackers. — Michael Demon Calce

It might seem that security should gradually improve over time as security problems are discovered and corrected, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. System software is growing ever more complicated, hackers are becoming better and better organized, and computers are connecting more and more intimately on the Internet. Security is an ongoing battle that can never really be won. — Evi Nemeth

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires. — Eric S. Raymond

Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them — Dean Stockwell

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth - they're now millions of members strong without any superfluous "buzz." They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with. — Ryan Holiday

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. — Philip Greenspun

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers - all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off - rushing to escape bankruptcy - plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty - to press more copper pennies - to breed more headless chickens - to put more feathers in their caps - medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates - eggs and eggs of headless chickens - multitaskers - system hackers - who never know where they're heading
northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward - (where is home) - home is in the head - (but the head is cut off) - and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity. — Giannina Braschi

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK - desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers") - whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? — Maggie Nelson

Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific! — Tad Williams

Coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder ... — Ryan Holiday

She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power. — Steven Levy

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of. — Mark Zuckerberg

Everybody knows if it's on the Internet, some brilliant hacker can get at it. — Lesley Stahl

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

Hackers in Hollywood movies are phenomenal; all they need to do is: "c: hack into fbi — Various

So... what was the reason to don't be social!???
...
Oh, thanks Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution for reminding me. — Deyth Banger

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market. — Ethan Zuckerman

It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution. — Ken Thompson

The smartest hackers understand that their skill at hacking technology may be less important than their skill at hacking the digital marketplace. — Douglas Rushkoff

I talked to the general counsel of the DNC, and he assures me that every step along the way, when we were notified of these issues, that we changed systems, changed procedures, but these hackers are so sophisticated that they changed procedures. — Donna Brazile

While the vast majority of hackers may be disinclined towards violence, it would only take a few to turn cyber terrorism into reality. — Dorothy Denning

I have a G4 at home. Theyre great machines for individual users, and I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft desktop, youve got to look elsewhere. — Nat Friedman

I was really fascinated by some of the things happening with Anonymous, the hackers group. I don't necessarily agree with everything they've done, but I thought it was a really interesting use of technology and the fact that there's a whole group of people who can take over systems and fight things from behind the scenes. — Michelle Gagnon

Lincoln had pictured himself building firewalls and protecting the newspaper from dangerous hackers - — Rainbow Rowell

Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of "How do I get customers for my product?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . . — Ryan Holiday

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages. — Eric S. Raymond

Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it. — Erik Naggum

"Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry. — Bruce Sterling