Slashdot Mirror
The Myth of the Superhacker
mlimber writes "University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Ohm, a specialist in computer crime law, criminal procedure, intellectual property, and information privacy, writes about the excessive fretting over the Superhacker (or Superuser, as Ohm calls him), who steals identities, software, and media and sows chaos with viruses etc., and how the fear of these powerful users inordinately shapes laws and policy related to privacy and digital rights."
Knightmare's "Secrets of the Superhacker"...m are/dp/1559501065
http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Super-Hacker-Knight
Who's afraid of a little social engineering?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Actually that quote originally comes from the French poet Baudelaire in the 1864 short story "Le Joueur généreux." The Usual Suspects just popularized it.
Mods on crack alert. The comment is a direct reference to this bash.org quote. Somebody please sort it out.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The concept and even the name of Satan predates the catholic church by a long time.
It's too bad the quote is "the devil" or you might have gotten yourself some free geek credibility there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed... Kevin Mitnick, as we all know is one of the more famous hackers, yet many argue that it was not his technical skills that made him so famous. It was his social engineering skills. He knew how to extract the right information from the right people so that he could then exploit the system.
Interestingly, they did make a movie about him, Takedown. While no Oscar winner, I felt is was one of the better hacking movies Hollywood has put out. As opposed to movies like "Hackers" or even "Swordfish", this movie's dialogue actually made sense to those who know the definitions of all of the acronyms (cause it's a true story), and the computers showed on-screen, actually looked like something people actually use.
But getting back on topic, it's the social engineers that we should all be afraid of. These guys may not be really hackers (at least not in traditional sense), they're really just con artists. You don't need a computer to get pwned.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
The last thing we wnat is this term misused in a law somewhere or even in popular usuage. Some poor sod getting dragged off by security after being heard uttering what will be the suspiciuous words "I'll have to get superuser access" is some stupidity we can live without.
Other than that there are good points - he's talking about the mythical "cyberterrorist" (also a bad word due to distinct lack of angry robots with bombs - but at least it doesn't already have a meaning).
Heh, I thought he was just using one of kevinsmithisms.
IPv4 address is a 32-bit integer. Typical notation is in base-256, but you can use other bases.
E.g. on my machine:
ping 66.102.7.104
is equivalent to:
ping 1113982824
Similarly, 24.75.345.200 is actually this address:
PING 407656904 (24.76.89.200): 56 data bytes
This is the lame ass address for the lame ass hacker in the lame ass movie The Net.