Forbes Offers a Sympathetic Portrayal of Hackers 97
selain03 sends us to Forbes for a surprisingly tolerant article on the recent Defcon. The reporter spoke to several of the event organizers and faithfully conveyed their characterization of the community as motivated by curiosity about technology. The article quotes a Department of Defense cybercrime guy: "Run-of-the-mill individual hackers are just noise as we try to focus on the real problem. We have to investigate every threat, but we're often dealing with ankle biters." A refreshing perspective to read in the mainstream media.
"Middle America, Meet The Hackers!" (Score:1)
Re:"Middle America, Meet The Hackers!" (Score:5, Funny)
You're forgetting pwn-ography never makes it to mainstream tele.
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Way back in the day, Hackers were and still are the folks creating the scripts.
"script kiddies" were little wanker wannabes that logged into an IRC chat or usenet session
and eavesdropped, glommed, or begged scripts out of real programmers. They then ran these
scripts thinking they were so 133t! This may have changed, but if you're actually writing or modifying
code call yourself anything other than a script kiddie.
Most of these so called script kiddies I've met couldn't code themselves out of a paper ba
"ankle biters"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"ankle biters"? (Score:5, Funny)
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www.nefcon07.com [nefcon07.com]
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It's called Burning Man [burningman.com].
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Re:"ankle biters"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Black hats go by a different name: corporate espionage. In that, they are in a profession of spy with computers and data, and not of personal communications.
Re:"ankle biters"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only movie related thing that is real for a black hat is the briefing closing line from Mission Impossible: If anything goes wrong, we don't know you anymore and have never known you even existed.
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If you have the skills and think it's something you're interested in, there are a few companies that are hiring in that area.
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/pedant
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Re:"ankle biters"? (Score:4, Insightful)
You now know whether these companies will beat earnings estimates or not. You can sell short or buy on margin with 100% confidence on the days these companies release their earnings reports.
So, no, you can't brag or tell chicks at bars that you are a spy doing espionage. But you CAN brag that you are a "trader" and are up 600% YTD.
Most companies barely fund and train their security departments well enough to stop mass worms--the kind that screw up large numbers of computers and suck up noticeable amounts of resources. There is NO WAY they would find a bug that does not replicate and lives on only a single PC in the finance department. Even if they did, they would likely just reformat the thing and be done with it. No reason starting in on forensics! Time is money!
Also, there is no huge chunk of money missing from any individual person, so who is going to hunt you down? You've only stolen a fraction of a penny per share from thousands of oblivious shareholders.
When the rewards are so high and the risks are so low, you can bet that there are many less-ethical people out there who are willing to do it, and would enjoy every minute of it. For some people, it wouldn't take much work convincing themselves that they are no more crooks than the people they are stealing from.
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Though companies do actually put that PC up for forensics. A PC is cheap. Rip it out, throw it to forensics, put in a new machine for the accountant. What really matters is that this MUST NOT happen again. That would cost a fair lot of money (especially if someone leaks that information). That loss would make the cost of a PC including forensic examination look like pocket change.
Such things do happen. And yes, they get investigated. In shor
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Most say "We have anti-virus and IDS, and we hired a few people at $60k to look over the systems. We have done our due diligence, so our ass is covered if something bad happens." Such places will also have the occasional meeting with the agenda: "How can we cut costs at our security department so senior exec b
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Only have a bug report when traffic to internet is high. Then post a few hundred bytes to a popular blog (slashdot) and have it xored to a known key.
Retrieval is easy. Hit target dump-site (the blog) on a wifi network, probably with proxies to even mask that.
Congrats. You just smuggled data out.
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If the target in question actually uses Wikipedia, this would be about as undetectable as it gets.
And yes, for retrieval, you use a power-boosted antenna to public wifi, bounce through a few countries, hit tor and check the wiki page. Though, if your bug uses good stego on a high-traffic page, such secrecy may not be needed.
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Good luck trying to find evil-ware when it's custom and yet munged with packers. It'd be better yet if the export was a gpg encrypted to a public key that was packed within. Do you think techies working in IT at a big company have the expertise to properly unpack and dead-list it correctly (assuming that the reverse assembly removes impossible loops)? I think not. Some of the
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- RG>
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Re:"ankle biters"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm honestly not afraid of hackers. I mean, the old school kind. The "real" ones. The ones that actually know that TCP/IP ain't the Chinese secret service and that a buffer overflow isn't something that requires a plumber to fix. In their growth years, they sooner or later stumbled upon the hacker's creed, and whether they heed it or not, the damage they do is usually minimal. Yes, they may steal your data (which is often enough a severe damage), but they don't destroy data intentionally.
What I'm afraid of is the scriptkid. The person without a clue, but with a tool. He doesn't know what he does, he doesn't know what he aims for, but he just clicks and hopes, trying to destroy and mess with other people's computers. He's the equivalent of the schoolyard bully. No clue, no skill, no perspective, but the need to once at least "prove" that he's "better" than someone else. If you're looking for wanton data destruction, that's the place to look for it.
Re:"ankle biters"? You mean Ankle Biting Zombies! (Score:2)
I can see it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can see it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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OK, time for some coffee, that was far too Confuscious-like...
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Mechanical Engineers.
That feels right.
The "burglar proof" safe isn't necessarily the "fire proof" safe. The engineer has to find a workable solution for the problem as a whole.
The truth behind this article... (Score:5, Funny)
Why forbes.com? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Forbes was the only site they had any luck with, since, having alienated techies so thoroughly, they couldn't hire a competent webadmin.
Re:Why forbes.com? (Score:5, Funny)
same passwords (Score:2)
So, kind of like a flat tax?
Not Daniel Lyrons (Score:5, Funny)
What, was Daniel Lyons too busy impersonating Steve Jobs to do the piece?
Ofer? (Score:1)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofer [wikipedia.org]
Ofer (Hebrew: ) is a moshav located south of Haifa, Israel in the Carmel Mountains and is a part of the Hof HaCarmel Regional Council. The moshav was founded in 1950 by immigrants from India. Agricultural income is derived from raising cattle, sheep and chickens growing vegetables and flowers, and tourism.
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The world is not fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The world is not fair... (Score:4, Informative)
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Self preservation? (Score:1)
Sympathetic (Score:1)
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Re:Hackers and Crackers (Score:4, Informative)
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Pervert vs concerned citizen (Score:2)
Both peep into locker rooms and watch 12 year-olds undressing, but there's a big difference! The pervert is doing it because he is a criminal and the concerned citizen is just doing it to see how it is done so that they can know how perverts do it.
Please folks... just proving you can break into someone elses computer or their car or spy on their daughters is wrong. If you really want to do something for experimental reasons
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Now I'm going to explain the difference between a pervert and an interested citizen.
Both peep into locker rooms and watch 12 year-olds undressing, but there's a big difference! The pervert is doing it because he is a criminal and the concerned citizen is just doing it to see how it is done so that they can know how perverts do it.
Is this some sort of fabricated justification you've made for yourself to better sleep at night?
Just a thought, 'cause that's a really bad analogy that wouldn't have passed most peoples "WTF?" filter.
I'm hoping Freudian slip.
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back hat bad,
front hat good!
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Being a hacker has everything to do with having talent at and taking delight in learning how large, complicated but internally consistent systems work and then using that knowledge to solve problems, overcome limitations and make improvements. A hacker is somebody who instinctively wants to take things - most often computer systems/programs - apart, tinker with them,
Alternate definitions (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was just starting learning security stuff circa '95-'97 the term 'cracker' referred (in most stuff I read and by people I talked to at the time) to people who modified binaries on their own system to do things they weren't supposed to (such as a no cd crack or adding new features to a binary - it didn't have to be illegal), while hacking usually referred to gaining unauthori
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A hacker is a person with no criminal intent breaking into a computer and just wants to do it to satisfy his curiosity, this however is not generally acceptable in our society. A Cracker is someone who does have criminal intent when breaking into a computer and does it for ulterior motives other then the attaining of knowledge. I believe the former should be allowed while the latter should be strictly discouraged.
I think this is - lo
About Forbes (Score:4, Insightful)
All it has is 3 things: (1) Articles that state the obvious (2) Shit load of Rolex and Lexus ads (3) Those top 10 lists like 'top 10 affordable vacation getaways' where their definition of affordable vacation is something that costs between $30k and $100k.
Sometimes it is almost like they are taunting the reader, saying "look, drool and weep".
Even in this article, their 'discovery' is that serious hackers are curious about technology, script-kiddies are just a nuisance.
Color me surpised...
Re:About Forbes (Score:5, Informative)
May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.
Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting. Malcom Forbes Sr's attitude was "Go ahead, sue me for libel. I'm a billionare". They've gone soft since the son took over.
Business Week, which used to be the cheering section for big business, has improved a bit.
It's not clear what will happen to the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch's ownership, but it's not looking good. The WSJ has gone downhill in the last few years, anyway. The fundamental problem is that its classic functions, stock charts and major stock-related events, are all on line now. Nobody on Wall Street needs to read the Wall Street Journal; anything that affects trading was on their Bloomberg long before.
American Heritage (Score:2)
I'd like to take a moment here to mourn American Heritage and its sister publication I & T, or as it was once known, The American Heritage [of] Invention and Technology. Literate, distinguished, gorgeously illustrated.
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All it has is 3 things and Point 1 are baseless. All opinion and
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Ankle biters (Score:2)
Don't underestimate the power of a desperate hacker in shiny leathers.
Own the Box (Score:1, Troll)
Did any boxes not get owned? How many?
How did the various OS's on the box fare?
Does anyone have any link to the results?
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