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The Myth of the Superhacker

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the scourge-of-the-internet dept.

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."

6 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. You too can be a Superhacker! by TibbonZero · · Score: 3, Informative

    Knightmare's "Secrets of the Superhacker"...
    http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Super-Hacker-Knightm are/dp/1559501065
    Who's afraid of a little social engineering?

    --
    Tibbon
    tibbon.com
  2. Re:From 'The Usual Suspects' by Logic+and+Reason · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually that quote originally comes from the French poet Baudelaire in the 1864 short story "Le Joueur généreux." The Usual Suspects just popularized it.

  3. Re:This article is stupid by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  4. Quote? YOU FAIL IT! by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.'"
  5. Re:Hollywood Strikes Again by businessnerd · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. Re:I know the Superhacker exists... by barrkel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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