Slashdot Mirror
Analysis of 250,000 Hacker Conversations
Orome1 writes "Imperva released a report (PDF) analyzing the content and activities of an online hacker forum with nearly 220,000 registered members, although many are dormant. The forum is used by hackers for training, communications, collaboration, recruitment, commerce and even social interaction. Commercially, this forum serves as a marketplace for selling of stolen data and attack software. The chat rooms are filled with technical subjects ranging from advice on attack planning to solicitations for help with specific campaigns."
you're using it wrong.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
You mean hackers get dates there?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In the first place, the meaning of a word is its use. Using "hacker" to mean people who bypass computer security to steal data or sabotage systems has been the overwhelmingly dominant use of the expression for thirty years, well-established in journalism and entertainment. I've read the essays by RMS and ESR describing the "hacker ethic", and I've read Steven Levy's "Hackers", and those are literally the only places I've ever seen "hacker" used with the positive meaning of unorthodox, enthusiastic, and highly skilled programmers, aside from the occasional references to RMS, ESR, and Levy, to complain about the prevailing usage of the term
Second, even from those accounts of the early history of programming at MIT, it was clear that "hacker" had an ambiguous meaning, at best. As I recall, Levy describes "hack" as a slang term in general use at MIT, to mean a clever and well-executed prank, such as disassembling a car and reassembling it in the owner's room. The MIT hackers were notorious for ignoring inconvenient rules governing computer access; Levy mentions how many of them took correspondence courses on locksmithing, so they could bypass locked doors.
Little of the communications was about respective pron? As a group, have Hackers become, and it is troubling to say it, but are they, "Settled Down?"
One sympathizes.
Most people on those forums are noob scriptkiddies anyway.
security corporations that house their own research "centers" or "divisions" and expect the findings to be taken with any degree of credibility like cern. from tfr, the group basically wrote an egrep script to parse about a month or so of channel logs, then converted their "analysis" into pretty pictures. the pretty pictures are then ginned up with nuggets of knowledge like "Since forums provide a sense of community, they are a natural location for social interaction." and "Hacking has become more and more complicated with several components required to execute attacks". toss in a few buzzwords like lulzsec, and you're done after 14 pages with a very large font. TL;DR: this is produced to be consumed by customers, not technical audiences like slashdot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I wonder how all of these conversations were recorded. If it was a 'public' forum, that would be ok.
If, however, they used false identities, masqueraded as other forum members, or outright tapped the communications going to the servers, then those gathering the information were in violation of several laws. Did they violate the server or forum EULA and TOS? Did they inform those conversing that the conversations were being recorded?
Is it fine when corporate entities do it for the purpose of profit, and only 'hacking' when individuals do it? Just wondering.
I would upgrade to Windows 8. This is not good for computers in general.
d1D %heY +alk l3ke +h1$??????
Aww, it doesn't look like they analyzed how many of them actually typed in proper English.
Most conversations start about a particular tech topic, then quickly diverge into arguments about Monty Python, Apple, Microsoft, Star Trek, The Force, Imagine a Beowulf of those, All your base belong to us, Good luck with that, It's a Trap, What could possibly go wrong, Move out of your parents basement, Yeah right, you have a girlfriend, Get off my lawn, and Dupe!
mod me funny
Is when you call them a Douche, you know they understand how you truly feel.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
Okay, here are at least some closer links.
Starting here: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/appb.html
1. "In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon." (Aka, not just 'someone on the internet but MIT producing their own journal.)
2. "The first self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late 1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee-the group behind the railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local campus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding. "
3. "By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them. The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" methods or software-writing procedures."
And from there, the rest is easier.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Judging by the user base and the sections listed in the analysis, Hack Forums. Yes, the name is a bit too revealing, but that's the internet for you.
Hmm. According to that reference, the term "bubbled up as popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s", which seems to imply that it didn't exist before 1950 rather than that it had long currency before that. And, again, it doesn't cite any primary references.
Still, I'm sure that if the MIT sense was in use before the TMRC, some enterprising geek will eventually find an occurrence on Google Books sooner or later. I searched Popular Mechanics back to 1905 (you'd think that they'd be using it if anyone was!) but drew a blank.