Teen Hacks US Intelligence Chief's Personal Accounts (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has now joined the CIA's John Brennan in having his personal online accounts hacked. A teenage hacker known as 'Cracka' has claimed responsibility for the hack, reporting that he had infiltrated Clapper's home telephone, online accounts and his personal email, as well as his wife's Yahoo account. Cracka had managed to change the settings on Clapper's Verizon Fios account so that any calls to his home number were redirected to the Free Palestine Movement group in California.

Comments

On the one hand ...

[gstoddart]

On one hand, kudos for being ballsy and doing this.

On the other hand, if you go messing around with the Director of National Intelligence ... well, you should expect some pretty heavy consequences.

And I'm sure they'll find all sorts of trumped up charges to make your life miserable.

Re: On the one hand ...

[gstoddart]

"Cracka" is a cracker not a hacker. Hackers do not engage in malicious activity but explore systems to learn about them.

BULLSHIT!

You kids who have retroactively decided to re-define hacker and cracker are so full of shit it isn't funny.

Historically there is no such distinction, and "hacker" was the only word for about three decades or so. A hacker may or may not have done anything malicious. Cracker is a word which came along much later. In fact, it came along in the late 90s and suddenly people started claiming there was a semantic distinction.

For anybody who was around before that, there simply is no distinction, and claiming it has always been so is a lie.

"l337 h4x0rs" were who hacked your system, no matter if they just looked around, or burned it to the ground.

Re: On the one hand ...

[Ash-Fox]

For anybody who was around before that, there simply is no distinction, and claiming it has always been so is a lie.

When I was browsing dial up BBSes back 1994, I remember the distinction being made, so this has been going on for a long time.

Out of curiousity, how far ago (like what year, minimum) does the distinction need to be to not be considered a retroactive decision to re-define hacker?

Re: On the one hand ...

[kevmeister]

As someone who WAS there, working with the security community dealing with the Morris work in 1988 and the WANK worm shortly after and as the author of the first detailed analysis of WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) while at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I was there when the term "cracker" was born. I can credit folks like Russell Brand (not THAT Russell Brand) with the creation of the term.

This was before the commercial Internet, before TCP/IP, and in a day when no one thought twice about having an open "guest" account on a system because computer security was not an issue. People who played around with computer code and modified system kernels, as opposed to those designing or writing them, were referred to as "hackers". We were professionals who did custom modifications to software and wrote tools to analyze them. At the time I had licensed access to the source code for a variety of systems of that day including AT&T Unix, RSX-11M, IAS, and VMS. Things like custom system calls, an un-delete command, code to allow a co-processor (FPS AP-120B) to directly access a computer's file system. These were what I was paid to do and I, like many I worked with.I called myself a hacker. I hacked code.

When the first transmittable worms, viruses, and trojans appeared, the people who wrote them were also "hackers", but those of us who hacked code legitimately didn't much care to be lumped in with the bad guys, so the term "cracker" was devised. It never really caught on. To most people, hackers are bad guys. It's unfortunate, but the horse has left the barn, and is now dead and continues to be beaten to a rotten pulp.

To this day, in the developer community the term "hacker" retains its original meaning, It's someone who hacks code, often to fix or work around limitations or bugs or to add new functionality. They still hold "hackathons" to work as a group on resolving very complex issues in open source projects and understand what "hacker" means in that context and just live with the fact that the general public has a slightly different idea of whet the word means.

It must be said...

[hyades1]

This has all the earmarks of a Clapper-hacker Cracka Caper.

there are two potential outcomes.

[nimbius]

outcome 1: Administration has as good laugh, invites teen to the whitehouse and a tour of the CIA. STEM and CS agendas are lauded and the teens intuition and cleverness are chamioned as a sterling mark of american ingenuity and creativity. peace in the middle east is championed as a fundamental necessity of the 21st century
outcome 2: the teen spends half a decade in juvenile incarceration and another few years in a correcitonal facility after age 18. his parents find gainful employment hard to come by. as a convicted felon the teen loses access to PEL grants and scholarships required to attend college. everything from fast food to janitorial work refuses to hire a felon, and public assistance programs from section 8 housing to food benefits categorically deny him.