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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.

19 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 iamdrscience · · Score: 5, Funny

      I understand your point, but c'mon, can you honestly tell me that if there were a fire convention, you wouldn't go? It sounds pretty awesome to me.

    3. Re:"ankle biters"? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    4. Re:"ankle biters"? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    5. 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.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
  3. The truth behind this article... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. Not Daniel Lyrons by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  5. Re:"Middle America, Meet The Hackers!" by syousef · · Score: 4, Funny

    Because that doesn't sound like a sitcom or anything...

    You're forgetting pwn-ography never makes it to mainstream tele.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  6. 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? ;_;

    --
    Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
    1. Re:The world is not fair... by LordLucless · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia's largest newspapers, had a fairly pro-Def Con article about it too. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/08/04/11856481 97448.html

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
  7. Why forbes.com? by Dr.+Cody · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Why forbes.com? by Propagandhi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Nah, Forbes is just so single minded it's super easy to guess their passwords (it's money, by the by... always money).

  8. 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...

    1. Re:About Forbes by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

      May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.

      Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting. Malcom Forbes Sr's attitude was "Go ahead, sue me for libel. I'm a billionare". They've gone soft since the son took over.

      Business Week, which used to be the cheering section for big business, has improved a bit.

      It's not clear what will happen to the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch's ownership, but it's not looking good. The WSJ has gone downhill in the last few years, anyway. The fundamental problem is that its classic functions, stock charts and major stock-related events, are all on line now. Nobody on Wall Street needs to read the Wall Street Journal; anything that affects trading was on their Bloomberg long before.

  9. Re:Hackers and Crackers by someone1234 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hacker originally meant anyone who dabbles with ANY code. Not necessarily bypassing security, and not necessarily on someone elses computer, and not necessarily without consent.

    --
    Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
  10. Re:Hackers and Crackers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Umm, no. Being a hacker has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to break into somebody's computer, be it for fun, profit, or whatever else.

    Being a hacker has everything to do with having talent at and taking delight in learning how large, complicated but internally consistent systems work and then using that knowledge to solve problems, overcome limitations and make improvements. A hacker is somebody who instinctively wants to take things - most often computer systems/programs - apart, tinker with them, put them back together again and in doing so learn something, so that they can do really clever things with that knowledge later: and who gets off on doing all of this.

    Hackers existed before most computers were connected to any other computers to break into.