If you're going to do it, do it right. Create a child theme as WPyogi has suggested, but don't modify the CSS to hide the area. That can be seen as cloaking links by Google and other search engines and can cause penalties because it looks like you're trying to hide links from normal users.
What you need to do is modify your footer.php file to remove the area that the links are in. That will remove them completely and correctly.