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Forbes Offers a Sympathetic Portrayal of Hackers
selain03 sends us to Forbes for a surprisingly tolerant article on the recent Defcon. The reporter spoke to several of the event organizers and faithfully conveyed their characterization of the community as motivated by curiosity about technology. The article quotes a Department of Defense cybercrime guy: "Run-of-the-mill individual hackers are just noise as we try to focus on the real problem. We have to investigate every threat, but we're often dealing with ankle biters." A refreshing perspective to read in the mainstream media.
Because that doesn't sound like a sitcom or anything...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
As shown in the past, it's often the very very simple hacks like finding an unprotected machine and installing sub7 on it that brings down the giants. A high level of technical experience is NOT a prereq. for a serious hack
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Who better to design safes than professional thieves?
The game.
Some of the Defcon guys thought it would be hilarious to hack a major media outlet and place a sympathetic story about themselves on it. Mission accomplished!
A Forbes article that isn't hyper-sensationalist and pro-status-quo?
What, was Daniel Lyons too busy impersonating Steve Jobs to do the piece?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Maybe I'm just being foreign, but what' the heck is an Ofer?
Why didn't the more interesting story about the evil undercover reporter who got pwned made it to the mainstream media? There's no justice in this world for hackers... Won't somebody think of the hackers? ;_;
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
So much easier -- and apparently more villainous -- than "a bazillion Americans too stupid to run antivirus software".
Maybe they saw what happened to the other reporter. *shudders*
But, of all the places, why Forbes? Couldn't they have picked some respectable outlet?
Maybe Forbes was the only site they had any luck with, since, having alienated techies so thoroughly, they couldn't hire a competent webadmin.
"They're so cute when they launch missles."
Table-ized A.I.
When I mention a Cracker images of white men or literal crackers may be appearing in your head.
Now I am going to explain the difference between a hacker and a cracker.
A hacker is a person with no criminal intent breaking into a computer and just wants to do it to satisfy his curiosity, this however is not generally acceptable in our society. A Cracker is someone who does have criminal intent when breaking into a computer and does it for ulterior motives other then the attaining of knowledge. I believe the former should be allowed while the latter should be strictly discouraged.
All it has is 3 things: (1) Articles that state the obvious (2) Shit load of Rolex and Lexus ads (3) Those top 10 lists like 'top 10 affordable vacation getaways' where their definition of affordable vacation is something that costs between $30k and $100k.
Sometimes it is almost like they are taunting the reader, saying "look, drool and weep".
Even in this article, their 'discovery' is that serious hackers are curious about technology, script-kiddies are just a nuisance.
Color me surpised...
Nah, Forbes is just so single minded it's super easy to guess their passwords (it's money, by the by... always money).
So, kind of like a flat tax?
Both peep into locker rooms and watch 12 year-olds undressing, but there's a big difference! The pervert is doing it because he is a criminal and the concerned citizen is just doing it to see how it is done so that they can know how perverts do it.
Please folks... just proving you can break into someone elses computer or their car or spy on their daughters is wrong. If you really want to do something for experimental reasons then set up your own car, computer or whatever.
All cracking/hacking someone elses equipment is back hat.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't underestimate the power of a desperate hacker in shiny leathers.
I've often heard what you call a 'hacker' called a 'white hat hacker' and what you call a 'cracker' called a 'black hat hacker'.
When I was just starting learning security stuff circa '95-'97 the term 'cracker' referred (in most stuff I read and by people I talked to at the time) to people who modified binaries on their own system to do things they weren't supposed to (such as a no cd crack or adding new features to a binary - it didn't have to be illegal), while hacking usually referred to gaining unauthorized access to anything, be it local or over network.
It all depends on what crowd you gained your definitions of hacking and cracking from. I prefer these definitions because they seem to have more precision. You can hack for multiple reasons (good or bad, white or black hat), you can crack for multiple reasons (good or bad, white or black hat).
A company I worked for had a lot of cracked copies of their software circulating the Internet and I spent some of my time for them reverse engineering and preventing one of their more mysterious and unsolved cracks - I'd call that white hat cracking.
I've been curious about the results of the Own The Box competition.
Did any boxes not get owned? How many?
How did the various OS's on the box fare?
Does anyone have any link to the results?
OMG! WTF! Ruuuuuuu-un!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The feds are absolutely right on this one. The threat from some pony-tailed, bespectacled nerd poking around where he shouldn't(the stereotypical Defcon attendee) pales utterly in comparison to serious cyber-criminals and/or state sponsored infrastructure attacks.
If the feds and the geeks can learn something from each other that may help protect us all, it can be nothing but a Good Thing(tm).
You people think the "security professionals" at the NSA/FBI/DoD write these "scripts"? The script kiddies themselves have created the vast majority of hacking tools. The reason white hats refer to them as script kiddies is because the average 14 year old hacker can program circles around the average security professional. What script kiddies aren't really good at is the "social engineering" part, which is essentially the spy craft. That's why they frequently get caught and the crimes the NSA/FBI/DoD commit go relatively unnoticed.
I'd like to take a moment here to mourn American Heritage and its sister publication I & T, or as it was once known, The American Heritage [of] Invention and Technology. Literate, distinguished, gorgeously illustrated.