Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.

You will not even have enough time to go online and download all the patches to your computer before it is infected.

It's not publicly known, but antivirus companies co-operate all the time. On the surface, antivirus vendors are direct competitors. And in fact, the competition is fierce on the sales and marketing side. But on the technical side, we're actually very friendly to each other. It seems that everyone knows everyone else.

Anonymous is like an amoeba: it's got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding -- they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida.

Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail.

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

It's going to be interesting to watch presidential elections in around 2040, when voters can dig up candidates' teenage angst pics and posts from old social media and discussion forum archives.

There is a difference between the stuff that people put online themselves, like pictures and their trips and flights and meals they've eaten, than the stuff that they don't realize is also going into foreign computers. Like, for example, copies of your emails or every single online search you ever do, 'cause all that is being recorded as well.

Today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer. This is happening to us today. And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it.

One thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families.

How many of the 'Fortune' 500 are hacked? 500.

I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all.

It's been a bit sad to see that out of Linux distributions, it was Android -- the most successful mobile Linux distribution -- that has really introduced the malware problem to the Linux world.

You can get the best locksmith in the world to design the best lock he can design, is it pick proof? No, it's not: it can be very hard to pick, but it is pickable. Because you can get, say, the next 10 best locksmiths, and give them unlimited money and time, they will figure out a way to pick it.

Defending against military-strength malware is a real challenge for the computer security industry. Furthermore, the security industry is not global. It is highly focused in just a handful of countries. The rest of the countries rely on foreign security labs to provide their everyday digital security for them.

The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down.

Governmental surveillance is not about the government collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly; it's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all, such as the online searches you do on search engines... or private emails or text messages... or the location of your mobile phone at any time.

Online crime is practically always international, because they almost always cross traditional national borders.

You should have mechanisms of communication, like faxes, which are obviously getting removed from offices because nobody uses them anymore. Faxes are great when e-mail doesn't work. I wouldn't be throwing them away.

It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.