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Forbes Offers a Sympathetic Portrayal of Hackers

Posted by kdawson on from the we're-not-the-enemy-and-they-know-it dept.

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.

9 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. "ankle biters"? by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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    1. Re:"ankle biters"? by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      True that, but is does take a great deal of restraint and expertise to go black hat and not leave a trace.

      Black hats go by a different name: corporate espionage. In that, they are in a profession of spy with computers and data, and not of personal communications.

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    2. Re:"ankle biters"? by Garridan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not really. People with extremely high technical competence still miss the little things once and a while. Only takes one little hole.

    3. Re:"ankle biters"? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You make that sound like it's some cool spy movie. It isn't. It's just plain illegal. Well paid, granted, but illegal. It's neither flashy (you can't even brag about your smooth moves!) nor in any way exciting.
      Imagine you have some custom malware which is only in use in a few places in the world. There will be no anti-virus signature for it because its custom. Now imagine it looks for certain words or phrases (such as "earnings") in Word or Excel documents and encodes the surrounding text in to some covert, background-noise packet, like NTP or DNS. You have also programmed your bug to only phone home while the computer is in use, so you don't trigger any off-hour activity alarms.

      You now know whether these companies will beat earnings estimates or not. You can sell short or buy on margin with 100% confidence on the days these companies release their earnings reports.

      So, no, you can't brag or tell chicks at bars that you are a spy doing espionage. But you CAN brag that you are a "trader" and are up 600% YTD.

      Most companies barely fund and train their security departments well enough to stop mass worms--the kind that screw up large numbers of computers and suck up noticeable amounts of resources. There is NO WAY they would find a bug that does not replicate and lives on only a single PC in the finance department. Even if they did, they would likely just reformat the thing and be done with it. No reason starting in on forensics! Time is money!

      Also, there is no huge chunk of money missing from any individual person, so who is going to hunt you down? You've only stolen a fraction of a penny per share from thousands of oblivious shareholders.

      When the rewards are so high and the risks are so low, you can bet that there are many less-ethical people out there who are willing to do it, and would enjoy every minute of it. For some people, it wouldn't take much work convincing themselves that they are no more crooks than the people they are stealing from.
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  2. I can see it... by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who better to design safes than professional thieves?

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    The game.
    1. Re:I can see it... by poopdeville · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mechanical Engineers.

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      After all, I am strangely colored.
    2. Re:I can see it... by smookumy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, exactly. After all, they're taught by the finest thieves: universities.

  3. The world is not fair... by Tatisimo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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? ;_;

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    Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
  4. About Forbes by prakslash · · Score: 3, Insightful
    May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.

    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...