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Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006
espera un momento writes "eweek.com picks the five hackers who made a significant impact on security and vulnerability research in 2006. These are some interesting choices of the guys (and gal) who dominated the media headlines. The topics covered included Wi-Fi bugs, browser flaws and rootkits."
Mr. Mrooe sure knows how to makes some good bugs :)
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A bad omen of things to come America.
Hackers - meaning people involved with information security.
No, the real folks that really 'left their mark' in 2006 are yet unidentified.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
It's like saying 2006 top 5 classified files. Not every hacker publishes his work.
What effect exactly have these two had? Made serious security researchers ridiculous by showing a rigged demo of a supposed exploit that until today hasn't been reproduced by anyone?
From the article: "However, security researchers who understood the technical nature--and severity--of their findings, Ellch and Maynor were widely celebrated for their work, which was the trigger for the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) project that launched with exploits for Wi-Fi driver vulnerabilities. Since the Black Hat talk, a slew of vendors--including Broadcom, D-Link, Toshiba and Apple--have shipped fixes for the same class of bugs identified by Ellch and Maynor, confirming the validity of their findings. " Look for 'Apple' and 'shipped fixes' in the text.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
From what I understand, Apple performed an audit of their code and found a few bugs that could potentially be used to exploit a Mac in a similar fashion. However, I don't think such an exploit was ever demonstrated. I think it was a good thing that Apple performed the audit and fixed the problems, but that doesn't say that the "vulnerability" Ellch and Manor "demonstrated" was legitimate. Possible, yes, but still unconfirmed.
Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006
Judging by the frequency with which most self-named Hackers change their undergarments, I'd be willing to bet that there are a lot more than five of them that have left a "mark" in the last year, if you know what I mean.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
How does discovering the Sony rootkit earn one the title of 'hacker'.
The question was: "What effect exactly have these two had?" My answer was: "Apple shipped fixes." Good enough for me.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
"and rootkits"
Finally an award the Sony Execs can be proud of.
We will never know about the top evil hackers of the Internet, they will not leave a single fingerprint. All we will find is the results of their "exploits."
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I think Dan Kaminsky deserves at least an honorable mention in this list. Russinovich broke the story -- Kaminsky drove it home. He's the guy who did some amazing research regarding Sony's rootkit and its spread. (Using dns cache to ferret out statistical data was ingenious.) Now, the rootkit debacle did indeed occur in 2005; however, he published his studies on the brink of the new year. This enabled (very successful) class action lawsuits to go forward against Sony in 2006 and undeniably helped educate the general public about drm nastiness.
At the very least, Kaminsky is on my list.
Hackers? In the "old school" sense of the word?
That's easy...
Richard Stallman - GNU as well as being a stubborn free & rights "pusher"
Linus Torvalds - Same as last year...Linux
Theo de Raadt - everything must be in auditable source form, NO BLOBs!
Steve Jobs? Well, maybe not...he's more marketer than hacker
And finally, oh, I dunno... maybe Mark Shuttleworth?
So these guys finds vulnerabilities in several companies (but not Apples) wifi drivers, the other companies fixed their drivers and Ellch and Manor was saluted for their security work. Apple also releases fixes for "other" issues but not this. On the day when Ellch and Manor where to demonstrate the issue they didn't choose a card with an actual vulnerability, instead they choose to jump on Apple and rig a security flaw in OS X.
Is this the scenario you think happened?
At the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch teamed up with former SecureWorks researcher David Maynor to warn of exploitable flaws in wireless device drivers. The presentation triggered an outburst from the Mac faithful and an ugly disclosure spat that still hasn't been fully resolved.
Um, yeah, because nearly all of the news coverage of the vulnerability didn't describe it as the general 802.11 vulnerability that it was, affecting multiple chipsets and drivers and multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; it described it, and indeed trumpeted it, as vulnerability that affected Apple MacBooks and Mac OS X, with most articles making at best a passing reference that it could affect other platforms, if they even said that. Stories ran under headlines like "MacBook hijacked in 30 seconds -- wirelessly", and made it appear to be exclusively an Apple problem.
While this was made clear in their demo, they chose to demo on a MacBook with a third party wireless card whose identity was hidden - because of "responsible disclosure" - but then in the next breath tell Brian Krebs at the Washington Post that the MacBook's own integrated wireless is exploitable in the exact same way. How is that "responsible disclosure"? And to top it off, we have a SecureWorks "Senior Researcher" saying that he wants to fix Mac users' "smug" attitude about security (and this helps Mac OS X security in a meaningful way how?) and that many of these people apparently need lit cigarettes jammed into their eyes (to paraphrase). Even if said in jest or in fun, how is that professional? How does that do anything to better Mac OS X security?
How would a change in "user attitude" change the actual security situation on Mac OS X? I don't see a change in user attitude changing anything. Many Windows users know, at least marginally, that they are the target of innumerable attacks and thousands of pieces of malware. How does that change in any meaningful way the security situation on Windows?
More to the point: how does the press making a general and serious 802.11 vulnerability affecting numerous chipsets, drivers, and operating systems appear as only a MacBook problem serve a meaningful, or even truthful or accurate, security purpose?
For Ellch and Maynor, the controversy offered a double-edged sword. In many ways, they were hung out to dry by Apple and SecureWorks, two companies that could not manage the disclosure process in a professional manner. In some corners of the blogosphere, they were unfairly maligned for mentioning that the Mac was vulnerable.
No. They were maligned for saying they espoused "responsible disclosure", even carefully hiding the third party wireless card, but then saying that the MacBook's integrated wireless was vulnerable in the same way. NO OTHER AFFECTED VENDOR OR OS was treated that way. Only Apple.
They were maligned for being party to a Washington Post article that made outrageous accusations, like alleging that Apple "leaned on" them to not show this exploit, when there is no proof of that whatsoever.
They were maligned because after working with Apple engineers for almost a week at Black Hat, they could not provide any information directly to Apple on how, precisely, Apple's integrated drivers were vulnerable. Should they "do Apple's work for them"? No. But these weren't hobbyists. These were people presenting under the guise of an enterprise security company with responsible disclosure, and when you unleash a firestorm of bad PR on one and only one company's new flagship consumer portable, you'd better be prepared to have a little higher degree of interaction with that one vendor.
However, security researchers who understood the technical nature--and severity--of their findings, Ellch and Maynor were widely celebrated for their work, which was the trigger for the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) project that launched with exploits for Wi-Fi driver vulnerabilities.
Yes. It was great that the
What about the guy that cracked HD-DVD's encryption scheme? That's surely more significant than most of these, and it happened in 2006.
Where's Kevin Mitnick?! It's a conspiracy!
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
...but doesn't Moore look like Al Capone?
Who said hackers are nerds? They all look pretty slick. And that chick is yum!
Let us not overlook the contributions of Lyger and Jericho at attrition.org, who brought us the tale of "The GPA Hack That Wasn't" ... not to mention those squirrel pictures.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/9999
'' The question was: "What effect exactly have these two had?" My answer was: "Apple shipped fixes." Good enough for me. ''
In that case, can we remove these two from the article, and replace their names with those of the unknown Apple engineers who went through the code and found whatever he found, to those who fixed the problem (probably the same ones), the unknown testers at Apple who made sure that the fix didn't break anything, and their manager who changed priorities to the wireless driver?
Paris Hilton not on the list!?
Exactly, I can point at any OS and say "Hey, I bet there's a security issue there". I can also promise you that if a researcher with talent and skill looks at it, they will find one. This does not mean that I've found a vulnerability, only that I can state the obvious.
Maynor and Ellch have lost all credibility as far as I, and many others, are concerned. They behaved in an irresponsible and unprofessional manner, and I don't think I'll be able to trust any information they release in the future because of this publicity grabbing stunt.
If you want to work in this type of field, you can't make fantastic claims and then back out on providing proof if you want to be taken seriously.
On a sidenote: I also think having them on this list is an insult to the others that are included.
I'm quite surprised that people can find as many exploits as they do.
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...Joanna Rutkowska is the best looking of the five.
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The poorly written code was in the Atheros driver, which was nothing to do with Apple, and indeed other platforms using the same hardware were also vulnerable.
They still haven't clearly stated that a stock Airport Extreme setup is as vulnerable as shown, as they clearly used a usb wireless device for the demo.
I would have more respect for these guys if they hadn't come out with the 'poke a lit cigarette in every Apple user's eye' comment which proved they had an axe to grind.
Unless I am mistaken both Maynor and Ellch said several times that the "eye" comment was changed by the reporter. They said at Defcon it was the actors in the commerical they were referring to,
Everybody know good hackers, nobody knows the great ones. Shrug.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Just wanted to wish you luck in your quest. Mine? "True Facts" -- Aargh, it wouldn't BE a fact if it weren't true...
A good one would not get caught
I great on leaves no trace they where there
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Where's the Ebaum's World community on this list? We've really done a number on Hal Turner, this past december. We deserve to be recognised.
> How does discovering the Sony rootkit earn one the title of 'hacker'.
He found it with a rootkit detector he made on his own.
this is one of the dumbest articles to be referenced on slashdot. Claiming these 5 "hackers" to left a mark while ignoring the real hackers (who cannot be named) is like going to Estonia to find the top 5 American football players while ignoring the entire North American continent. I'm very much dissappointed this got by you moderators. Quite sad. okay, now mod me down...
HD Moore was by far the biggest contributor to change in security in 2006, metasploit is a hugely influential tool, allowing anyone, regardless of ability, penetrate insecure systems. Use extends to good or evil, but it's definitely significant.