Hackers: Under The Hood

jyre writes "ZDNet Australia has a special report that profiles and interviews five hackers over the next five days. Day 1: Raven Alder's page is up now (inludes photos). Day 2 will be Attrion.org creator, Jericho. Day 3: Adrian Lamo. Day 4: Kevin Mitnick and Day 5: L0phtCrack creator, Mudge."

Comments

Ah, Attrion.

[FlyingJesus]

I love attrion.org! It's the best way to start my day, opening the old browser and surfing on over to attrion! First on my list of things to do in the morning!

Mods don't hurt me :)

Who?

[blair1q]

The total amount I care about self-proclaimed "H4xx04s?"

0.

Re:She looks halfway decent at least

[nadda]

dude, that's her first grade photo.

L0pht crack

[solid]

Mmmmm... L0pht password cracker. *urgh!* "Me use brute force!" *urgh!*

Re:She looks halfway decent at least

[Da w00t]

Raven's my coworker. Quite techincally, she rocks. and oh, that tit size comment? ... (a direct quote)

"Fuck you ".

And yes, she's talking about You

Re:She looks halfway decent at least

[Saint Stephen]

You obviously haven't ever met any really ugly women. Trust me, they get a lot worse than that. Think Jean Teasdale from The Onion.

Perfect Ad

[Jade E. 2]

That's got to be the most perfect ad-to-article match ever. The interview contains these paragraphs:

"The root problem that the security industry has is ... unscrupulous people selling to an uninformed market. The managers buying security products don't understand security at all, and so they trust the vendors to tell them what is best," Alder argued. "And somehow, conveniently, what is best has a great overlap with whatever that particular vendor happens to be selling."

...

"[Companies] have the latest and greatest firewall that nobody has ever bothered to configure, or a very expensive intrusion detection system (IDS) that nobody has the understanding to tune."

And the ad on the page says "Today's threats require a lot more than a firewall. This is a lot more than a firewall. Symantec Gateway Security 5400 series" (Ad here.)

That's about the most perfect example of what she's talking about anybody could have come up with...

Re:Prominent (and "notorious") hackers

[Zog The Undeniable]

Yup, that would be the same L0pht Heavy Industries that sold out and became @stake, Inc. I mean, FFS, they could have at least called themselves @st4k3, 1nc.

Re:It would be nice if they could spell...

[Ziviyr]

You use IE?

<voice impersonate="southpark:wendy"> Ewww, gross! </voice>

Re:She looks halfway decent at least

[L0stb0Y]

At least they didn't regress to the "nice boots" comment you're likely to get at the local g0th club-

LosT

Re:Perhaps we'll see

[pommaq]

Yeah, she could "audit" my "security" any day

Non-issues

[zoeblade]

From the article: Gender is a non-issue... If there's one thing [Raven] hates, it's being type-cast as a "chick hacker".

What a fantastic way to start off an interview: with something the interviewee doesn't consider in any way important! Do these people actually objectively read what they write?

Obligatory Python reference: "And did you write this music in the sheds?"

Re:raven asking for stereotype

[MissionControl]

she rants about how she dislikes being stereotyped. i dunno, by the look of her picture, big goth boots and all, she's just asking to be stereotyped...

So in other words, "She rants about how she dislikes being stereotyped. I dunno, I'm great at stereotyping people."

Virginia Tech

[kyoko21]

Raven went to Virginia Tech :-) Let's go Hokies! Even castrated turkies can be hackers, too. *gobble gooble*