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

Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.

I saw myself as an electronic joy rider.

Any type of operating system that I wanted to be able to hack, I basically compromised the source code, copied it over to the university because I didn't have enough space on my 200 megabyte hard drive.

I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.

Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker.

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