Article:		Fear and Loathing in Information Security
Subject:		Hacking
Date:		2005-02-17 10:33:22
From:		Mick.Bauer
Response to: Hacking
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.")

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Hacking
  2005-05-11 12:56:41  crash15139 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I "get" the point of our essay. And I come from a reference of having poked into a few systems in my day starting with the old Tandy's & AS400's. Even an old hacker like Steve Wozniak is a hero of mine & I get the mindset. Now, the culture part of it is your own opinion. My experience is that the crews I knew or ran with were not about solving problems, but about getting around the "rules" everyone else had to succumb to. You are making these people out to be more important than they are. If you really wanted to help, you would gather all these ethical hackers & petition Microsoft to stop binding every important process/service to TCP/IP, let's start there, & start knocking down why their OS is so vulnerable, why haven't any of your ethical hackers banded together to do this?? I'll tell you why, they need Mircosoft to be a step behind, oh yeah, for their own curiosity.....