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."

Comments

Hollywood Strikes Again

[gbulmash]

Just as with any other field or profession, hacking is getting more specialized. It's not that the "superhacker" does not exist, but that such an animal's existence is getting harder and harder to maintain merely because of the expanding skillset and knowledge it takes to be a "hack anything" hacker.

That said, a lot of exploits don't come from being a super techie hacker with the skillz to defeat any system through sheer programming ingenuity or brute force. A lot of them still come from social engineering... convincing foolish people to give you enough information that a middle manager could hack them using nothing more than a standard login.

Where the "superhacker" mainly exists is in the movies. The guy who can pull out his laptop at any given location and hack into any given location on demand and with no preparation or research into the target. He's the human equivalent of the gun that doesn't run out of bullets and hair that dries into a perfectly coiffed do within seconds of getting out of the water.

- Greg

Re:From 'The Usual Suspects'

[hey!]

St. Augustine has a worthwhile point to make here.

He was dealing with a fundamental theological problem: how does a good God create a universe in which evil exists. He came up with a novel solution: it's all good, but evil chooses lesser goods over greater goods -- an concept closely akin to the modern economic concept of opportunity cost. You cannot have the capacity to choose without the capacity to choose the wrong thing; if you were forced to choose the right thing all the time then you wouldn't have free will. Therefore free will implies the existence of evil, which is not a thing in itself, but a deficit.

Dante sharpens Augustine's point in the Divine Comedy: evil is really the result of stubborn, even aggressive stupidity. As outlandish as the punishments that are meted out in the Inferno, they're all pretty much people getting unlimited quantities of whatever it was they pursued in life.

The Devil, then, doesn't need to exist; at least if he does he has no power of his own. There is no need to believe in the nearly all-powerful devil of neo-Christian folklore. The power of Satan, both biblically and by orthodox theology, lies in the stupidity and stubbornness of humanity. A near omnipotent Devil is not really any better off than a powerless but tricky one because (a) near omnipotence is not very useful when the other side is omnipotent and (b) it is impossible to spread evil (in the Augustinian sense) by the exercise of raw power.

Which brings us to the Superhacker. There is no need for a hacker to obtain near omnipotent technical skills. In any case people with extremely high levels of technical skills have better uses for them. Instead, a hacker exploits the stubbornness and stupidity of people who own computers. They won't pay competent people to manage them. They'll choose software for superficial convenience. In Augustinian terms they choose the lesser goods of short term cost savings and convenience over the greater good of security.

control

[wall0159]

Hackers, terrorists, drug dealers, child molesters, communists:

Useful tools for the control of a fearful and gullible populace.

Odds you will be a victim of

[king-manic]

Hackers

Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.

Odds 1:10,000
worse is you bank with retarded banks.

terrorists

Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!

odds 1:1,000,000
worse if your brown and live in a poor nation

drug dealers

You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage. You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin? Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull? What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that seek to make money peddling meth to school kids, or pretend they don't exist?

1:2
But the majority are pot pushers who sell to your kids. Your kids use it like you used to use beer... or pot/lsd. The potential harm for most people is minor.

child molesters

Ever met someone who had their youth stolen by someone like that? Let's find you a few thousand of them, and then you can address them, explaining how the people who did it to them don't exist, or aren't really a problem, and should be allowed to keep doing it. I'm sure you'll be persuasive.

1:100,000
Although these sick bastards affect everyone around their victims, they aren't that numerous. Many people still lead okay lives afterwards with some issues about security and sex. It's not a very homogenous group either.

communists

Well, you've got me there. They only killed a few hundred million people in the last century, so that's not so bad.

0:1
Communism is an idea. What killed most of the people your refering to is mob justice, fear, racial hatred, green, xenophobia, and poor management. Communism is general is a useless idea that was never fully implemented by anyone, could never be so, and used liek religion to clobber people.