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BusinessWeek on Hacker Hunters
prostoalex writes "You keep hearing about FBI, Secret Service or other law enforcement authorities involved in pursuing international cybercrime gangs, but who are those people and how does the cyberlaw enforcement work? Business Week talks about hacker hunters and people they're after. A large portion of the article is dedicated to describing the global scope of such activities with Russia, Eastern Europe and China leading the ranks for criminal hideouts."
Could we please try to restore the word "hacker" a more positive meaning on mainstream media?
*sigh* Could we just once please stop this endless discussion?
What does it matter what a hacker and a cracker is? As if a programmer gets more attention once the media start to call him a hacker and call the phishers crackers. Also: definitions can change, you know that?
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Well, why not whine about that gay now mean homosexual and not jolly or that spam should only used to descripe some kind of food.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
You are the people with the motivation because you are the ones who will benefit from a more positive definition.
So quit pissing into the wind and just come up with a neologism for the positive aspects (old aspects) of the term hacker.
If you're a masochist then keep on trying to convince people who won't benefit one way or the other to change their behavior.
The actual exploitation, however, is the fault of the person who actually takes advantage of said vulnerability, much the same way that the mere vulnerability of your average car to theft does not in any way excuse the actual act of doing so.
/do/ know that if he had malignant intent, he could have done a variety of things; and if he managed root/adminstrator access, you have a very large problem on your hand.
From the victim's point of view, barring taking the system apart and comparing it with a known uncompromised version, it's damn near impossible to ensure that further damage wasn't done. Even if the machine isn't listening on any ports at all, for instance, it doesn't mean that a program couldn't have been modified to open up a back door several months later. An e-mail client could have been modified to auto-execute instructions from certain attachments. Or so forth. You can't really prove that the intruder was a theoretically benign 'hacker' instead of somebody with more malign intent, but you
Ideally, you would prefer that the vulnerablity not have been exploited at all, but that the person sharp enough to notice such would bring it to the attention of those in a position to do something about it -- notifying the authors of the relevant software, for instance. If you notice that your garage door opener opens numerous garages in your neighborhood, you should probably mention this to the manufacturers or your neighbors rather than notifying them of the problem by visiting their garages when they're not expecting it.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
That may be true. But it will never happen, because it is in the very nature of a hacker not to care what ignorant people think.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
it is in the very nature of a hacker not to care what ignorant people think.
It's also in the very nature of a hacker to know *everything* and to be a pompous ass that nobody listens to, anyway.
I don't respond to AC's.
You misunderstand me. I'm not fighting one way or the other. I'm stating a fact. Hackers won't change, because hackers don't care.
I can assure you there are many people who use "hacker" and "to hack" frequently in their everyday language, and if you suggested that they abandon the term simply because John Q. Public uses it differently, they'd laugh at you.
All language is context sensitive. Know your audience and you'll be understood. It's pointless to critize BusinessWeek, but it's similarly pointless to criticize people who use the term among themselves for the older meaning.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
What does it matter what a hacker and a cracker is?
Does it matter what the difference between an African-American and a nigger is? Or a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Or a republic and a democracy?
Yes. Yes, it does. In the hope for a better world, language is our greatest asset.
Er, a large generation /might/ be becoming criminals, but with respect to computer crime that's a separate issue mostly -- file trading (and IIRC, many of them are probably only liable for civil suits so far since the bar for it becoming a criminal matter is fairly high). That's a lot more common of an offense than anything that might be considered hacking by even the most generous definitions.
As for the manifesto itself, it's absurd and incredibly egocentric. "Judging people by what they look like"? No; we're going to judge you by your actions, if you get caught trying to manipulate somebody else's bank account. A suspect's age, or lack thereof, is irrelevant other than one might actually get *leniency* if the court thinks that the accused is just a temporarily stupid kid who'll grow out of it if given another chance. A 43-year-old man of sound mind who should damn well know better by his age is probably more likely to get the book thrown at him.
Doesn't matter if you're fat or an athlete; precocious or not; curious or, er, not; living in your parent's basement like an impoverished vampire, or bedding every prom queen in a three-state area. The ethics and consequences of an act don't fundamentally change. Figuring out how one's DVD player handles CSS or figuring out how to update the data in your car's navigation system is still pretty spiffy, but spending one's time releasing worms that consume bandwidth and memory while forcing victims to figure out whether the worm could have installed any backdoors is still damaging -- and the more intelligent one is, the less excuse there is for not having thought of the consequences.
*snort*
Yet more rambling could take apart the whole "bored with school" line, as well. I knew a bloody lot of people who excelled academically; the most extreme might have been a person who (by the finish of her high school years) mastered calculus by about 13 or so, was fluent in multiple languages from different linguistic families, also played a musical instrument IIRC, and still somehow found the time to be a competent athlete. The 'smarter than her teachers' claim that often radiates from somewhat bright youngsters might actually have been true in her case, but instead of using this an obnoxious "I'm smart enough that your ethics don't apply to me" card, she and her parents simply raised the bars very, very high.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
First, that's not in every jurisdiction. Just in some of the more overworked ones. The threshold is not just a total of what was stolen, it includes man hours (for recovery and [non LE] investigation), along with other resources.
Second, it's still a federal offence. Speeding is still speeding, even if you pass a cop doing 65 in a 55. But does he stop you? If the cop tried to stop eveyone doing 65 in a 55, he'd never get the guy doing 80 (and the real danger).
I agree. And I'm willing to take donations.