The Seven Types of Hackers

Bruce Schneier's blog links to a nifty article listing the seven types of malicious hackers. The list is: Cyber criminals; Spammers and adware spreaders; Advanced persistent threat (APT) agents; Corporate spies; Hactivists; Cyber warriors; and Rogue hackers.

Comments

Re:Wait A Second

[Anonymous Coward]

He lists malicious hackers!

innacurate re: wikileaks

[Junior J. Junior III]

From the article:

Malicious hacker No. 5: Hacktivists
Lots of hackers are motivated by political, religious, environmental, or other personal beliefs. They are usually content with embarrassing their opponents or defacing their websites, although they can slip into corporate-espionage mode if it means they can weaken the opponent. Think WikiLeaks.

I'll grant that Wikileaks are activists. I'll also grant that they have some great hackers working for them. But what the article describes as "hacktivism" is not what wikileaks does. Wikileaks employs hackers defensively, to provide a secure system that guarantees anonymity for the sources who leak information to them.

Although there have been allegations made in the press by people who probably don't know anything about information security, I have seen no evidence that suggests that Wikileaks obtains information by cracking into systems. On the contrary, Wikileaks have always claimed to work by receiving information from sources who were privileged with access to the information, and who elected to leak it to Wikileaks out of duty to their conscience.

There has been, to date, no evidence brought forward which suggests that Wikileaks has ever broken into a system to extract information out of it. That isn't the way they do things.

There are "hacktivists" who do things like deface websites in order to publicize a cause, or DDoS attack some target that they disagree with. But that is not what Wikileaks does, either. Misguided sympathizers from "Anonymous" may have done some of these things in an attempt to aid Wikileaks, but that is still not something that Wikileaks does or endorses.

Re:The common thread

[jayme0227]

Nah. Some of them know they are criminals. Their moms probably think they're good boys, but these guys who are actively participating in organized crime know that they are bad guys.