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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.
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. Neither is being wanted by some three-letter-agencies. Do you happen to know why they ALL have three letters, no matter what country or nation they belong to?
The only movie related thing that is real for a black hat is the briefing closing line from Mission Impossible: If anything goes wrong, we don't know you anymore and have never known you even existed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is a prerequisite, though, for hacks that aren't executable by clickmonkeys. Granted, pretty much every exploit there is today has been "tooled" to perfection, so that even the most clueless brick on earth can use them to do harm.
I'm honestly not afraid of hackers. I mean, the old school kind. The "real" ones. The ones that actually know that TCP/IP ain't the Chinese secret service and that a buffer overflow isn't something that requires a plumber to fix. In their growth years, they sooner or later stumbled upon the hacker's creed, and whether they heed it or not, the damage they do is usually minimal. Yes, they may steal your data (which is often enough a severe damage), but they don't destroy data intentionally.
What I'm afraid of is the scriptkid. The person without a clue, but with a tool. He doesn't know what he does, he doesn't know what he aims for, but he just clicks and hopes, trying to destroy and mess with other people's computers. He's the equivalent of the schoolyard bully. No clue, no skill, no perspective, but the need to once at least "prove" that he's "better" than someone else. If you're looking for wanton data destruction, that's the place to look for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.