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.

The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests.

The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access.

I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.

Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!