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The Inner World of Gov-Sponsored White-Hat Hacking
romanval writes "Anonymous leaked emails of white-hat hacker firm HBGary shows how it develops and markets products to government agencies. From the article: 'In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge. They focused on ports—a laptop's interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two.'"
A 'White Hat' hacker is someone who aims to improve security; HBGary are aiming to take advantage of exploits in order to hack into computers, for mining personal information. They are most definitely 'Black Hat'.
Why would this qualify as "white hat"? Because they sell their solutions to corporations? Corporations are often no better than the mafia: check how well established and still active corporations helped bring Hitler to power.
What would it be called if they sold their solutions to the "legitimate" government of Saudi Arabia? Or to Hamas (who was elected as the representatives of the Palestinian people)? Would it still be "White hat"?
I propose that "White hat hacking" be reserved only to those who use their skills for the good of the community as a whole. Just my 2 cents.
White-hat? Hacking doesn't automatically get a white hat just because it's done for your favorite government (or other organisation). Developing malware and rootkits destined for actual use is black hat hacking, plain and simple. HBGary did both black and white hat stuff.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Greg Hoglund is a leading expert on rootkits, and per the article it was he who did all the developement and research. If the article tells the truth, the firm sold advanced rootkits to the US government, and the latest iteration would have been one that used advanced memory management techniques to jump around in process memory and do it's thing without using any OS-managed structures, thus evading detection. I don't grok this at all, but it sounds like an advanced version of a technique I read about where the malware extracted the code from DLL files and ran things without having to go through the OS. So that part was entirely llegit, but the social networks part (which the government apparently wasn't at all interested in, presumably because they already got a contract with those Palantir guys) was evidently a catastrophe in the making.
Emotions! In your brain!
I'd read TFA earlier. I decided to read the discussion here to see what interesting thoughts people might have on the topic, only to find page after page of arguments about hat colors. WTF? Pedants very rarely ever add to the discussion. Their comments seem mostly intended to inflate their own sense of superiority, and sadly often derail the discussion here as so many readers seem inclined to try to prove they are smarter. I'm sure someone will post a snarky reply that I must be new here. I'm not. I learn something every day reading here. However, this has got to be one of the most vacuous discussions I've seen related to what is a technically interesting topic that deserved better.