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

It would be nice if they could spell...

[Xenographic]

You like looking at the IE error page? Weirdo ;P

Everyone should know that it is ATTRITION.org, anyhow (and, at least, the link is correct).

Fight back against shock site trolls

[britneys 9th husband]

As you should expect for a -1 moderated comment, the parent's link leads to a shock site (lastmeasure in case you're wondering).

When you click on the link, your information gets added to this page where I guess the trolls get to see who's visited their site.

Now then... surely someone on here can find some interesting and creative things to add to this table. Hint: whatever's on your clipboard when you click on their link ends up in the table. Ditto for referrer links and other information.

Second profile is already up

[prat393]

and available here

Re:She looks halfway decent at least

[zoeblade]

You're getting shocked by immature comments on slashdot? Is this your first time here?

Did you actually read the article that Raven wrote and linked to? It was quite insightful...

Re:Attrition!?

[maxpublic]

Also remember not all intruders are "dumb kiddies" there takes skill in a real intrusion even if you are using pre-canned exploits.

Script kiddies are called that for a reason. Often young and not terribly bright, they take programs written by others, programs they don't understand and can barely use, and launch attacks against the systems of others with them. Script kiddies, by definition, couldn't successfully modify or improve the code of the programs they employ if their lives depended on it.

From my own experience I'd guess that perhaps only one in twenty so-called 'hackers' has the first damned clue what they're doing. Of this subset perhaps one in twenty could actually write an intrusion program of minimal value. And of this subset, perhaps one in twenty is actually skilled enough to call themselves 'hackers' and be recognized as such by expert coders.

The actual number of hackers, or folks I'd deign to give the title, is minimal. The number of script kiddies is legion. This is actually a good thing, as you'd rather your average petty criminal was a fucking idiot than a genius any day of the week. It's easy to defend yourself against an moron who can't respond to a change in defensive strategy because they're incapable of modifying the code of their tools or coming up with a creative way to launch an attack; it's much more difficult to match yourself against someone with real talent who's spent years honing their skills in intrusion.

Max