My primary goal of hacking was the intellectual curiosity, the seduction of adventure.

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.

Social engineers veil themselves in a cloak of believability.

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

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.

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

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.