I use Mac. Not because it's more secure than everything else - because it is actually less secure than Windows - but I use it because it is still under the radar. People who write malicious code want the greatest return on their investment, so they target Windows systems. I still work with Windows in virtual machines.

The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network.

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls.

When I was in prison, a Colombian drug lord, offered me $5 million in cash to manipulate a computer system so that he would be released. I turned him down.

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.

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

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.