Slashdot Mirror
Stupid Hacker Tricks - The Folly of Youth
N_burnsy points out an article in Computerworld which "profiles several youthful hackers, some still serving prison time, some free, who have been caught indulging in some fairly serious cybercrime, and looks at their crimes and the lessons they have (or have not yet) learned.
Starting with Farid 'Diab10' Essebar, currently a guest of the Moroccan prison system, who wrote and distributed the Mytob, Rbot, and Zotob botnet Trojans. There's Ivan Maksakov, Alexander Petrov, and Denis Stepanov, all guests of the Russian penal system, sentenced to eight years at hard labor for creating a botnet to engage in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to blackmail online gambling sites based in the UK, threatening to take the sites down during major sporting events. Then there's Shawn Nematbakhsh who was a little too eager to prove a point about the electronic balloting system that the University of California employed to hold student council elections, by writing a script that cast 800 votes for a fictitious candidate named American Ninja." Not everyone on the list is exactly youthful, and the range of offenses shows how lumpy this area is both to the law and in public perception.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;193960399;fp;16;fpid;1;pf;1
steampunk web design
University student imprisoned for interfering in University council elections as a way to expose how bad the voting system is?
There is no justice in the world. That kid should have been given a fucking medal.
OK, if you're happy and carefree it no longer means you're gay unless you're homosexual, and hackers are now criminals who break into computers. Even the tech press is calling cyberglars* "hackers". Even slashdot, who should have striven to maintain the word that used to be a badge of honor back when nerds were being rediculed, uses "hacker" like the ignorant lusers do.
:(
So what's the new word for someone who writes quick and dirty code that actualy runs, or changes a transistor radio into a guitar fuzzbox?
BTW, if you wrote TFA shame on you! the proper word is "script kiddie", cyberglar, cyber burglar, "computer criminal". Not "hacker" for God's sake. Just because Joe Sixpack thinks a "hacker" is a criminal and RAM is a brand of truck doesn't mean we should share in their ignorance.
"I used to be a gay hacker, now I'm only a happy nerd"
-mcgrew
*Yes, I just coined that word. So sue me.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
'American Pie' meme warning !
Watch that ass in prison.
that tom hanks/ leonardo decaprio movie about frank abagnale serves up the most useful point about guys like these:
1. convict them and put them in prison
2. take them out and convert their sentence into useful work for the federal government. if they f**k up, back in the hole they go
when some guy finds a chink in a voting system and exploits it, yes, he's done wrong, but he's also done society a service, no matter what his intentions were. this doesn't necessarily need to be rewarded, but it does need to be recognized as useful work in pursuit of a useful goal for society. these individuals, however morally and ethically flawed, still have use to society
what they need is supervision, like frank abegnale, and skills that previously went to petty vandalism and self-indulgence at the expense of society can instead be converted into useful work for society. these individual must be supervised, since their ability to form ethical and moral decisions has obviously been shown to be severely compromised, but you will note that frank abegnale today is currently very wealthy and quite the free man, and all of his current wealth accumulated through honest work. rehab is not only possible, but it is also profitable, for the individual who needs an ethical and moral correction, and society at large
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No-one who saw it thought it was folly. ;)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Shame on you Shawn Nematbakhsh, all respectable Slashdot-reading hackers know the fictitious candidate is always CowboyNeal.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
You know the fourth or fifth minute of any CSI episode, just before the Who song and the opening titles, wherein the cops are looking over the corpse of the week and one of them smirks and says something completely snarky and graveyard-humor-y about the whole situation to their appreciative chortling colleagues?
This whole article is like that.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
People and corporations want to create tools. They want to do this cheaply and quickly. Instead of putting more money to make the system perfect, they prefer to simply make sure it works.
If everyone accepts that systems can't be 100% secured and voluntarily refrain from abusing systems, no playful kid and no adult weirdo would go behind bars.
Instead of trying to punish everyone, we should try to educate and prevent crimes by focusing on humans and their lives isntead of focusing on the machines and their systems.
If even harmless hacks are illegal and may land you in jail, only serious criminals will take the risk (for serious potential money gains).
I think that is why there are less reports about benevolent hackers pointing out security flaws these days, but lots of reports about botnets for spamming and DDOS activities.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Another article about some skiddies and irritating computer criminals. And they even get the title 'Hacker', it's absurd :(
Plus convicting someone for showing that your voting system sucks, is retarded. He didn't even do anything malicious. Corporate whiners who can't handle their software sucks...
P.S. (on
I wonder what would that Rinzai guy show to a sexual predator.
"Cracker" is the distinction made only within the tech community. To the general populous, "hacker" is firmly entrenched and carries the same meaning.
If you really want to change that perception, plan to run full page ads in every major newspaper (because the people who misuse the term are less likely, imo, to get their news online) and launch a multi-million dollar TV campaign in every major market for a few years. Even then, you'll still be vexed by people who will use the old term, but having run the campaign, you'll be able to elevate your level of righteous indignation.
Then you might be able to start a new affinity group: Mankind for the Ethical Treatment of Hackers (METH).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I voted for American Ninja.
Game... blouses.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead the taxpayer loses by having to pay to keep him and he loses even more by being imprisoned - the only winner is somebody whose conviciotn numbers have gone up by one more by locking up a prankster because that is easier than dealing with actual dangers to society. People should realise that their taxes would be lower or spent on something other than petty revenge without mismanagement such as this. Unfortunately hard line law and order gets votes while valuing the rule of law and thus not being injust takes more effort.
"3. You've taken a job away from an honest man and given it to a crook."
a crook can't steal a job from an honest man if the job in question doesn't exist. the crooks in question here are doing jobs no one else is doing. otherwise, their exploit wouldn't exist
"4. The other half million blokes in prison still get to rot."
yes, which is exactly what they deserve. robbing banks and raping women isn't very new or very interesting. discovering a technological exploit no one else is doing IS interesting and useful to society, however badly implented by the crook. thus, under supervision, they get free card out of prison to use their skills for good rather than for smarmy pranks or self-indulgence at the expense of society
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One thing that really has hit me in the past however is the inappropriate almost military level responses to computer crime in several cases. For example, a few years back the DVD Jon raid involved an international paramilitary team to catch a single unarmed teenager.
"just because you may not have reached puberty doesn't mean you can't be arrested and prosecuted for cybercrimes. It just means your parents might go to jail also/instead, or have to pay a huge fine, and then who's going to drive you to band practice or soccer games?" i imagine a 13 year old hacker looking more like this than a kid who plays soccer
The weekend has landed. All that exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties. I've got 48 hours off from the world, man
Morris was around 23 when he created his worm, and while he wasn't a teen, that was still a pretty young age.
Free Kevin !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This reminds me of the time my high school told us that we were not allowed to do write in votes on the ballet for homecoming king and queen. The winners, strangely enough, turned out to be dave, and "billies nipples", getting about 1/3 of all the votes. It was too bad though, made us do a revote, and threatened to suspend people who made lewd comments on it again.
he was caught, rehabilitated, and then he earned his money honestly
yes, if he didn't pursue a life of crime, he wouldn't have a penny today. but that's only half the story
equally true: if he wasn't caught and rehabilitated, he would be living dishonestly off of his ill-gotten gains in a pension house in rio de janiero, or, more likely, be rotting in prison in france or somewhere else
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you are over 45 and you never attempted to gain unauthorized access before you were 20, you either
* were not skilled enough to avoid being caught and you knew it
* had VERY good morals
* didn't have an opportunity
Before the mid-80s "casual" hacking was just as likely to get you a job as it was punishment. By the late '80s and '90s there were much better ways to prove you were good and too many people were misusing other's computer for purposes other than "because they could" or "because it was cool" or to save a few bucks on long distance phone calls.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some of these are fairly innocent hacker pranks.. the kinds of things you do because you can. Like stuffing votes for a fake candidate.
But those russian guys.. sure, they had a botnet.. but the DDoS extortion they did was straight-up extortion, and it had a huge price-tag on the online gambling industry. We aren't talking about a few 10's of thousands here.. they extorted a great deal of money out of the industry, and aside from that COST many companies a great deal in lost profits by shutting them down over key business days.
and i'm showing how it is possible to salvage his "contribution". he did engage in smarmy vandalism of the process you know. that means he does deserve to be punished in one form of another. but not so severely of course, and not without recourse to salvage his skills for the good of society, rather than teenaged pranks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
About a year ago I was playing a silly Flash game at a site belonging to Telstra, and after a few rounds got bored and fired up Wireshark to see how it logged the scores.
I found the URL it used to post the scores back to the content server and, in a flash of idiotic curiosity, changed my score to some huge number, requested the URL and checked the scoreboard.
It was quite thrilling to see my name at the top, with a score a hundred thousand points higher than the next person - then I realised I'd probably committed fraud, especially since there were prizes for the winners. I hurriedly emailed Telstra, apologised very humbly, and asked them to forgive me. When I checked the scoreboard a few days later, my score was gone, and I never heard from them.
Pretty amazing, considering they had my mobile phone number, email address, IP address AND a written confession.. there must be some nice people working at Telstra (or they couldn't be bothered following it up). Either way, I'm very, very grateful that they let it slide.
YEAAAAAAAAAH!
How about in the editor-tagged rejoinder about rtm, who is nowhere discussed in the article? Robert MOORE, Timothy, not Morris. Moving on to the actual article (is anyone actually discussing this, or is it all about the usual hacker-vs-cracker meme?)
I found the article particularly annoying in its attempt to link the perps with animal torturers, its feeble pop-cultural references (Cavemen? from a Geico commercial?, and its breathlessly righteous neener-neener overall tone. Is it an Australian thing, that law-and-order is so delightful? If so - oh, the irony.
sloth jr
From the article: Enter Shawn Nematbakhsh, computer science undergraduate at the University of California. Was he eager -- perhaps a bit too eager -- to make a point about the electronic balloting system that the university employed to hold student council elections, when he cast 800 votes for a fictitious candidate named American Ninja? Sadly, no.
"I really wasn't making any point at all," Nematbakhsh admits, debunking news reports to the contrary. "It was a senior prank, a silly thing." This makes me sad. I mean, here we had somebody who appeared to be fighting the good fight, when in reality he was just mind-fucking people.
Now, can you people please read TFA before submitting a story? I mean, is it really that hard? Really???
or are you some sort of elaborate troll?
i can't conceive that you would actually think like that
"Example: How many teenagers would know the experience of killing someone if they weren't engaged in doing so for the military?"
uh, PLENTY, moron
ever hear of a gang?
do you live on this planet?
if you are just trolling me, i have chomped hard
please tell me you don't actually believe what you say:
"No organization is ethical or moral, because these are qualities of human beings - qualities that more frequently get subverted by government than they are by "petty vandalism" or "self-indulgence". "
it is malformed individuals who most frequently subvert moral and ethical behavior, not governmental organizations. really, fruitcake, that's the truth
in fact, within the context of a human organization, there is the further observation that any subversive activity is not actually being done in the name of that organization. on other wordsa, individual within that organization are just gaming the system for selfish goals, not working in the name of the system
such that criminal governmental workers aren't really acting in the name of the government, they are acting in the name of themselves, and can be expelled and punished and the governmental organization can continue with its stated mission
unfortunately, deluded fools such as yourself will then believe these criminal, expelled governmental representatives are the actual real face of the organization. when obviously they are not
in other words, you can hold a governmental entity accountable to clean up its mistakes. such that even though any human organization falls short of perfect performance, a human organizaiton that TRIES to be ethical, and is ethical most of the time, is far better than convincing yourself (falsely) that there are no ethics or morality at work in any governmental organization
this is just wrong of you. not theoretically wrong, but just observationally wrong. you don't seem to be able to adequately perceive the obvious reality of governmental work as it actually is. you must be operating under a heavy load of fud and propaganda to believe as you do
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...oh wait... nevermind...
it's my style, and i like it. i find it pisses off the kind of people who i want to piss off, who i'd rather not associate with in the first place
those who don't seem bothered by it usually also don't have a stick up their ass, their minds are more supple. brittle minds need the rigid formatting conformation to prop themselves up. the lack of formatting drives them nuts, simply because their minds are so feeble, not for any valid reason i should actually recognize and accomodate
so i've come to depend upon my lack of capitalization as a useful filter in chasing away minds i don't want to interact with anyway
I'm entirely capable of using the shift key at any time. I simply choose not to, consciously. And I never will use the shift key. Sorry.
go ahead and mod every comment of mine from here on out as "troll", i don't fucking care
this is who i am, i'm not changing for anyone, for any reason. deal with it or fuck off
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You mean now I have to change my Nick, because of the clueless masses?
No thank you, I'll continue to call myself a hacker and continue to hack radio controlled cars into drinkbots, collect, demolish and reconstruct all manner of mad science electronics and yes, even hack my computers. What do I care what the ignorant masses think, and if they fear me, then so much the better. I've been hacking for nearly 40 years, and I'm not going to give up the word so easily.
And yes I tilt at Windmills.
I don't care if I wind up being the last White Hat Hacker, I will not go quietly into the Night.
There should be Rage at the dying of the Light. The meaning of words change when those who use them let them change. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a word with dual meanings, but we should not give up so easily. We should instill the true meaning into the next generation, only then will we be able to preserve and perhaps reverse the decline of the word. I've seen people using the word "ethical hacking" to refer to hacking opposed to cracking, so there is yet some hope.
Did anyone actually read the blog posts from the guy who put the "beatdown" on the 13-year-old hacker? Maybe I'm just too cynical, but it sounded like a bunch of hooey to me. The chat screenshots especially didn't ring true. A real story about putting a script kiddie in his place is at least mildly interesting, but a self-aggrandizing story of a fictional beatdown on fictional hackers (if that's what it is) is pathetic, at best.
and my comment was laced with insults directed at you, while you made a polite request laced with compliments
;-)
i am entirely aware of all of that
one wonders why you think that matters
"If anything, you have only served to reduce yourself to the level of the so called 'feeble minds' you complain about by resulting to childish defensive name calling."
a feeble mind is a brittle, inflexible mind. asperger's type people. anal retentive. minds set in their ways, compulsively fixated on form, such as grammar, completely empty in the realm of function, the content of one's thoughts. these are minds that are often scrupulously correct on the small feeble pointless questions of grammar, but utterly empty in the realm of interesting mental content
it is of course possible to have good grammar, and interesting content. but i just simply don't care. it is more interesting for me to wage war with those fixated on the value of aesthetics over actual content. this war has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the agenda at hand, but it has evertyhing to do with my own personal agenda. which i hold in greater regard than the common agenda
so to the character failure of childishness you accuse me of, i add the following: arrogance. but either of these character failures on my part, the arrogance and the childish defensive name calling, is completely unlike the character failure of having a small shallow brittle mind
so i entirely own up to my character failures. i accept your charges against me, i validate them. and i have absolutely no interest in correcting them. i am however, fixated on pissing off feeble minds obsessed with shallow form over actual deeper content of one's thoughts
in short, thanks for the compliments. and in return, i say: good day asswipe
xoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
allow me to short circuit your entire thesis with the following dumb as bricks obvious observations:
;-)
1. it is an absolutely inherent aspect of human nature to form organizations. you will never stop human beings from doing this, short of fundamentally altering human nature itself (thats scifi, btw, not reality). if you destroyed every government, religion, or other organization on the planet, new governments, religions and other organizations would spontaneously form to fill the vacuum. its completely unavoidable: you are dealing with a social, hierarchical primate
2. a human organization is, by nature of specialization, orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum of its parts, and additionally, many many orders of magnitude more powerful than the individual. no group of individuals (nevermind the ironic ddefinition "group of individuals") can possibly surmount that power. is it right? is it wrong? is it ethical? is it corrupt? doesn't matter. it exists, and it is powerful
in short: get used to what you hate. 1. its not going away. 2. its more powerful than the individual. work THROUGH organizations, reform them. destroying them is like cutting yyour arm off because you have a hangnail: stupid, and you don't understand the proper approach to the problem
some day im going to die. i dont like this fact, but i accept it and incorporate it into my worldview as an insurmoutable truth
organzations will always exist and will always be stronger than the individual. you can deny that obvious reality, or you can incorporate this insurmountable truth into your worldview, and therefore more effectively fight the abuses you hate, abuses you hate for good reason
i respect your heart. you are outraged at the crimes you see commited by government and organizations. and rightly so, and i share your outrage. however, although you have heart, you don't have the mind to go along with it, and so you are useless
marry your passion with a better understanding of the reality of what you are fighting, and thereby be actually effective in fighting it
perhaps you could organize a group of individuals to fight the crimes you see (i hope you get the joke)
oh, i forgot the name calling: good day, moron
xoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because i think it makes me special
;-) i am redoubled in my efforts ;-)
i do it because of the kind of people i piss off by doing it
i don't think i am special or unique or notable
but i do think i annoy you (and i obviously do, by your post), and that is the source of pleasure which drives my behavior
because the kind of people i annoy by doing it, are the kind of brittle asshole i hate
so thanks for feeding me
xoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Robert Tappan Morris (Morris Worm author and computer science pioneer) != Robert Moore (Idiot Perp from the article).
Friends help you move
Good friends help you move Bodies
...but it would be criminal if University of California did NOT learn a lesson from its brush with hacking.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
organizations exist
;-)
always have, always will
therefore, the solution to the abuses you (rightfully) see involves working through organizations, tweaking them, not working against them, destroying them
because you can never destroy them
do you understand that?
furthermore, no organization can be 100% ethical. all you can do is CONSTANTLY work with them to make them as ethical as possible
"I presented an argument that basically stated that organizations are inherently amoral and if they are amoral, they cannot be a force to enculcate morality - as you suggest."
let me be clear: organizations will never be 100% ethical. but with hard, constant work, by people with your heart, but a better mind, they can function at 70-90%
as for "I presented an argument that basically stated that organizations are inherently amoral" is such low iq teenaged nihilistic emo bullshit, it is beneath my ability to stomach the hand holding intellectual charity work to show you that you are wrong. you're wrong, you simply are. that i am not defending that statement is not because i don't have a defense for that statement, btu that i don't have the desire to engage in the intellectual chairty work required for you to understand the fucking obvious
but i'll throw you a bone:
http://www.msf.org/
so, figure it out yourself
or remain a useless emo retard
xoxoxoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what is interesting about that SPECIFIC example? frank abagnale made specific powerful technological innovations.
Pretend you're talking to someone who doesn't watch every pop movie that goes by on the idiot box, but who has (a) been involved in real life situations where someone supposedly came up with really clever new tricks but turned out to be just another script kiddy, and (b) has personally watched reporters (let alone people making docudramas) screw up fundamental facts like this.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to (a) support your characterization of this fella, and (b) demonstrate that this kind of case is common enough to be used as the basis for policy.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
The best way to do that is to cost them a lot of money (or threaten to) or earn them (or save them) a lot of money. The easiest way is to cost them a lot of money. Pity it's unethical.
A valuable skill in any manager's job is learning to listen to the people working for you. I've had the pleasant experience of having managers with that skill, and I've saved them a fair amount of money as a result.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
Like, say, by taking the piss from people who think you're a twit for not bothering with ordinary punctuation?
(oh, didn't I mention, I didn't lose my job to a crooked ex-con... this isn't about me, you'll have to try harder to piss me off)
If I come and expose the gaping security holes in your house, you'll be ok with that? If you come home and find me milling around in your living room or rifling through your things, you won't get mad right? After all, I was just exposing the security holes, I didn't do any harm!
If you aren't ok with me going through your things without permission, I'd have to ask why you are ok with with breaking in to someone else's stuff. You can't have it both ways, if your stuff isn't fair game, why is their stuff fair game?
And please don't pretend like you have any serious home security. I'm quite sure you have a standard pin-tumbler lock like everyone else in the world. Not only is it trivial to pick, but I don't even need to do that. Since the blanks aren't controlled I just get a blank and make a bump key.
that organizations like msf can do good
now you babble on about how they aren't the big organizations
to borrow a phrase from you: "This is quite a different argument from your original."
just grow the fuck up already. take your heart, which is in the right place, and try to grow a fucking brain on top of it. because right now, your current set of operating assumptions about how the world you live in works is pure teenage crap
you'll get it someday
good luck kid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but you are most definitely a teenager ideologically
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i think i am pissing you off
Thanks. You made my point for me.