For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.

If you go to a coffee shop or at the airport, and you're using open wireless, I would use a VPN service that you could subscribe for 10 bucks a month. Everything is encrypted in an encryption tunnel, so a hacker cannot tamper with your connection.

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

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect your self as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.

I believe in having each device secured and monitoring each device, rather than just monitoring holistically on the network, and then responding in short enough time for damage control.