Article:		Fear and Loathing in Information Security
Subject:		Hacking
Date:		2005-02-16 04:26:40
From:		crash15139
Response to: Hacking
So that is to say, if I leave the door to my house unlocked by accident, then I deserve to be killed in my sleep? If you walk by a store at 2am & see the front door is cracked open, it's not against the law to walk in and take what you want? ALL hacking is unethical & hiding in the underground of IRC only proves ALL hackers are cowards & criminals.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Hacking
  2005-02-17 10:33:22  Mick.Bauer [Reply | View]
  
  
  No, no, no. The point of my essay is that most hackers are too ethical to hack into even the most poorly-secured system or network, unless they've been paid to do a penetration test or vulnerability assessment, by the system's/network's rightful owners. Most real hackers are too smart and too ethical to behave otherwise, in my experience.
  
  To say "unsecured sites deserve to be hacked" is naive, immature, and unethical -- the police don't care, particularly, whether the person you mugged was 200 lbs and heavily armed, or 130 lbs and helpless. But the poster you're responding too isn't really saying otherwise -- I think the point instead is that like it or not, we need to pay attention to security, regardless of who we think the attackers are likely to be.
  
  Also, we've still got some vocabulary-confusion, here. As I said in the essay, hacking is bigger than penetration-testing and virus proof-of-concept code; it's a mindset, a culture, and an approach to problem-solving, of which computer security is only a subset. (I know, most people don't know or care about this distinction, but the title of the essay is "Fear and Loathing in Information Security," NOT "Fear and Loathing in the Mainstream Media & Popular Consciousness.")