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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."

2 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ah, just call me... by ez76 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It is a foregone principle in developing secure systems, that you have to assume every user is the "superhacker" and cannot be trusted.

    It doesn't take much reasoning to show why this must be the case.

    So why is Ohm resistant?

  2. Re:Whois Paul Ohm? by digitalhermit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All it takes is a little ignorance.. There's a saying that goes, "The man with one eye is king in the kingdom of the blind." I'm hardly a guru and know about as much about DNS, TCP/IP, networking and operating systems as the next career IT guy. But it's cool how things get started..

    At one company I was asked to "break into" a Windows machine. The previous user had left and only he had the password. He was not on speaking terms with the company. Luckily, the user had given me the password to another system. Even luckier, he used the same password. So after about fifteen minutes of making myself look busy, I tried his password and got in. No one asked how I was able to get in; everyone assumed that I was able to hack the system.

    At another company there was a dusty router that sat in a rack. One day it stopped working. They'd tried power cycling it (their usual troubleshooting step), but that didn't work. So I went in, unplugged it for a few minutes, plugged it back in. I was looking through the manual for a troubleshooting guide when someone comes over and congratulates me.

    Richard Feynman had a similar story but it involved safe cracking. And most people know the joke about the plumber, the punchline being, "but knowing where to hit costs $300." Forget the latter, it's not relevant...

    Anyhoo, the point I'm making is that it's easy for people to mistake dumb fool luck and bullshit for real expertise. I know this firsthand.