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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."
I'm actually surprised there have not been more television biographies on hackers. It seems A&E Biographies, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel etc. would want to tell these stories.
www.reeddavid.com
If you aren't computer-ignorant. But the media are computer-ignorant, and are happy to stay that way.
A few years ago a major New Zealand ISP was "hacked" -- or so the media said. The biggest talkshow host of the time interviewed the alleged "h4x0r" live, and proclaimed him to be a "computer genius". We were all in deadly and imminent danger of being hacked by guys like him he said.
The "hacker" in question was a 13 year old whose friend's older brother worked for the ISP. The older brother had stupidly given his staff login and password to his kid brother, who had, naturally, shared it with his friend, the "genius hacker". This friend then logged in and deleted a bunch of hosted websites. Pretty frikken 1337, huh?
Take the little assholes out and beat them with wet towels, then make them parade naked through the streets. A fit punishment for such computer Uber-Gurus.
I thought it was nicely ironic myself. I didn't have anything to do with choosing the ads, of course, but if I had I couldn't have done better. [grin]
Feel free to be a self-admitted feminist, but realise that the likes of that group are responsible for banned books in Canada.
Through its decision in the Butler vs. Her Majesty case, the Supreme Court of Canada adopted Catherine MacKinnon's definition of obscenity nearly word for word into Canadian law. This 1992 court decision -- which was vigorously championed by most feminists in Canada and the US -- allows Canadian customs to seize what it judges to be pornography at the border as the material is being imported. In reaching the Butler decision, the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was violating freedom of speech, but it deemed the possible harm that pornography could inflict on women to be of greater legal significance.
Unlike others I generally prefer to keep my opinions of a woman's body to myself. However, I definately can't support any set of ideals that requires mass censorship. I believe that makes me anti-feminist, but moderate.
You, on the other hand, may not be a feminist at all, at least according to that article, although you choose to identify with them.
Pardon me if I came on a bit strong there, but when a select minority-by-choice of people can, at a whim, introduce sweeping censorship laws I get really pissed off.
If you are asking for a change from society's old views of yourself, you might want to avoid clothing yourself in a devil's cloak. In short: Choose a better term than "feminist". I don't believe you are one, and the term carries far too much misandrist baggage for you to be taken seriously.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Well, if it was a "scum" definition, I would think that I wouldn't have qualified to be interviewed. Behold the angelic halo. [grin]
I've had this argument with journalists before; it's one of the reasons that I tend to avoid being interviewed.
"Tell me about your secret blackhat teenage years!"
"Uh, I never had a secret blackhat teenage phase."
"Oh, come on, you can tell me."
"No, really, I didn't."
Repeat ad nauseum.
I noticed that in the article you gave some suggestions for what people should learn about.. I'm not nearly advanced enough to delve into any of that, though. I'm not as interested right now in security (just because I don't have the knowledge to approach it at the moment) but I am interested in learning more in general.
;) - perhaps because I'm much better with projects than tests, and the classes I took were centered mostly around tests. I'm still interested in learning more about programming and "how things work" in general, however.
I tried studying CS at my university and found it didn't interest me as much as it did when I studied it on my own (hence my becoming a sociology major
Do you have any suggestions for studying on my own? Would it be best to learn one programming language very well and then apply it to others, or is there a better approach? (One of the things I found frustrating in classes was learning a new language in every class I took, when I don't know any language well at all.) What advice can you give someone who would like to learn more, but doesn't do as well in a traditional CS/EECS/etc academic environment - books, good websites, anything? You also said that you were studying "an unrelated field," so I was curious as to how you went about learning more..
(Personally, I know little bits of C, C++, Python, Perl, and Java, but not enough to do anything significant in any of those.. I also have written a few little shell scripts that don't do much. Otherwise, I'm pretty clueless - but I'd really like to increase my knowledge.)
Thank you in advance to Raven and/or anyone else who gives me some advice.
Reading the article, I found absolutely nothing to indicate Raven's past is anything less than aboveboard. She has pretty much the same skillset I do (albeit she's better than me in a few areas). I came by my skillset via purely ethical means, so until and unless I get evidence otherwise, I'm going to assume the same holds true for how she got her skills.
I, for one, welcome competent people but I do give a damn what plumbing they've got...but it doesn't affect my opinion of their competence.
When people make hurtful personal remarks, sure, that's immature, and shouldn't enter into a discussion on what is basically a profile of a person as a hacker. I'm equally offended when people make fun of RMSs beard or Tron dude's camel toe..
I find girls more attractive than guys. I don't think she's a better hacker (well..maybe a better social-engineer:o) just because I think she's attractive. Likewise, I don't think RMS is any less of a hacker just because I don't find him attractive(I'm sure he'll be upset:o)
But people do notice these things, and in an environment where anonymity is so readily available, you can't expect them not to pass comment.
Watch the film Gone In 60 Seconds, with Nicholas Cage. It actually deals with the analogy you raise here. On the one hand you have Memphis, a highly skilled car thief with a passion for cars. There are practically no cars that he can't steal, and he steals them because he just loves cars and driving them (during the timeframe of the film he is stealing them to save his kid brother).
:)
On the other hand you have your dumb car thief. In the actual film someone pulls a gun on the big black guy (character name escapes me) who is driving with the window open. He sums it up with the words 'Anyone can pull a gun on somebody' (after he takes out the wannabe carjacker).
Stealing cars is legally and morally wrong, in both of the situations above. It's just that at least Nick Cage put in the time and effort to steal something because it meant something to him. Transfer this analogy to the computer world - script kiddies versus 'skilled hackers'.
I wouldn't want someone to break into my house, but if i had the choice between coming home to find a window smashed, glass all over the floor,graffiti on the wall and all my stuff gone compared to finding the Chubb bolt has been surgically removed from the door and a note saying 'Thanks for the Ming Vase', there'd be at least a slither of admiration for the 'skilled criminal', even though I'd want him arrested and that at the end of the day he's still a thief. People who are good at what they do, whether it's for good or for evil, will always be more respected than the crude, lazy fuckers who try and copy them. A lot of people think of Hitler as a good leader (come on, he was), even though he committed such atrocities.
Note that I'm not actually disagreeing with you, in a perfect world we'd not have to choose the lesser of two evils
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
But if you lose your keys and you don't have a backup set stashed anywhere, your next step will be to call a professional thief^H^H^H^H^HLocksmith to break into your house and re-key those locks for you.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I work in the security industry (okay, so right now I'm on hiatus from the security industry while I finish my Master's, focusing in security) and I've yet to meet one single reputable ex-cracker.
I highly doubt that.
Perhaps you only know one person who admits to doing enough that you would call them a cracker, but I bet you know of a few more people that have at least done something akin to cracking, and probably a whole bunch more who've decided it would be better to never mention anything like that in their past, despite having done it.
Reading the article, I found absolutely nothing to indicate Raven's past is anything less than aboveboard.
I certainly wouldn't claim to know any specfic person's past , but who DIDN'T have a trick or two up their sleeve in college?
I'm not saying something as serious as changing their grades, but little things that they knew they weren't supposed to be doing, but did anyways.
Life is too short to proofread.
My wife and I were in Butler, PA about 2-3 years ago to consult a doctor. We arrived early, and decided to wander around a bit and grab a bite to eat.
So, we walked by a storefront with a sign on it that said "Attrition". I glanced in the windows, saw a bunch of hardware, and took a few more steps before I realized "Hey... I *know* who that is!" I went back and poped in with my daughter, just to say hi. Gist of the conversation:
What really registered with me was that here was a fairly well-known web site, being run out of Butler, of all places. No need to live in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston, or any of those other urban sprawls... just find a nice town, get yourself a net connection, and you're in business.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Last month I had the privelage of watching a small hacking competition as part of a larger defense contractors conference. (Southeastern Software Engineering Conference). The had a small network set up to simulate a corporate network and teams attempting to attack it. The team that did the best was a red team from Northropp Grumman (which someone said won the Defcon capture-the-flag competition though I never looked it up).
The thing is, their strategy seemed to be to map the network, then run pre-packaged attacks appropriate for the specific device, then install a backdoor and repeat launching off of the machine they'd taken. Security experts in all their interviews repeatedly state that it is undesirable to do this, (ie, use previously written code for the bulk of their pen testing/attacks). Is there a disconnect between what security experts say and what they actually do?
(I do want to add that the team that won was very impressive, taking about a box an hour through the 6ish hours the contest was run. There was a very small time frame which might have necessitated the canned attacks. But the network was representative with at least 1 dedicated firewall, IDS, and honeypot and computers running windows, linux, and solaris. All with reasonable patching.)
I do security
For Adrian Lamo, the so-called "homeless hacker", there was no turning back after discovering how to make both sides of a 5.25in floppy disk writable at the tender age of eight.
Uh... Who didn't figure that one out the second they saw the notch cut into one side of the floppy? After all "double-sided" is a dead giveaway. It's a pretty logical conclusion to come to, especially since mini-casette record-protect tabs work on the same principle. I guess this makes me and all my friends "hackers", because not only did we figure this out, but we already had modded hardware and programs for breaking copy-protection and copying disks by that age.