Computer hacker

“ The term "hacking" is used routinely today by almost all law enforcement officials with any professional interest in computer fraud and abuse. American police describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or against a computer as hacking.
Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-intruders choose to call THEMSELVES. Nobody who "hacks" into systems willingly describes himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser," "cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street gangster." ”

“ In many ways, the core tenets listed by Levy continue to define the culture of computer hacking. Still, the guild-like image of the hacker community was undermined by the overwhelmingly populist bias of the software industry. By the early 1980s, computers were popping up everywhere, and programmers who once would have had to travel to top-rank institutions or businesses just to gain access to a machine suddenly had the ability to rub elbows with major-league hackers via the ARPAnet. ”

“ When police officers march through the front door of a hacker's home today, they may be better prepared than their predecessors, but they will also be facing bigger hurdles. Today, top hackers encrypt everything sensitive. The data on their hard drives, their live data connections, even their voice conversations.
So, if hackers are still hacking, who are their targets?
It is a broad field. Any type of network provider—X.25, cellular phone or large Internet provider. Computer vendors—the manufacturers of software and hardware, routers, gateways, firewalls or phone switches. ”

“ You still play other computer games, but now you have a new and bigger game. This one will bring you a different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders.
Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception. You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels "real." It's not simply that imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from "real life." Cyberspace is NOT REAL! "Real" things are physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. ”

“ In the new, severe, responsible, high-stakes context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into question.
What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway—how should society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just BROWSERS, harmless intellectual explorers? Were they VOYEURS, snoops, invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated as potential AGENTS OF ESPIONAGE, or perhaps as INDUSTRIAL SPIES? ”

“ They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get caught because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods may read underground boards (with a condescending smile) , but they never say anything there. The "best" hackers, according to legend, are adult computer professionals, such as mainframe system administrators, who already know the ins and outs of their particular brand of security. Even the "best" hacker can't break in to just any computer at random: the knowledge of security holes is too specialized, varying widely with different software and hardware. ”

“ Frequently, hackers impersonate legitimate system users; this is especially common in systems where users can employ common passwords or maintenance passwords found in the system itself.
76. Password protection is often mischaracterized as a protective device against unauthorized access. However, the modern hacker can easily circumvent this protection using one of three common methods. If a hacker is able to discover a password allowing access, then a trojan horse program can be placed to capture the other passwords of legitimate users. ”

“ An estimated one million computer users categorize themselves or are categorized as hackers. After the Homosoto bomb was dropped on America, a spontaneous underground ad hoc hacker effort began to help protect the very systems that many of them has been violating only the day before. The thousands of bulletin boards that normally display new methods of attacking computers, invad- ing government networks, stealing telephone service, phreaking computers and causing electronic disruptions, are now competing for recognition. ”

“ Some professional informants, who make it their business to retail knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate security, have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand. This is likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My best guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess that as few as a hundred are truly "elite" —active computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate security and law enforcement. ”

“ As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;" if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better. ”

“ Crash," which appeared in electronic form in Phrack Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built the first modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind. "As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. ”

“ Feds can trump hackers at almost every single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating computer systems—CRIMINAL computer systems. Secret Service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground. ”

“ The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work. The true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it—all remain obscured.
Another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine concern. Where there is persistent crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result. Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking —these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically influential. ”

“ Later, Crunch wrote the EasyWriter word-processing program used on the Apple and later the IBM PC.
On balance Cheshire thinks that hackers do more good than harm. “Let’s say you have money in a bank,” he says. “Wouldn’t you rather that a hacker get into its computer than a criminal did? He could warn the bank. If I had money at a bank, I’d feel safer with hackers checking out security.”
Well, it depends. Some hackers are nothing more than electronic vandals. Some are a privacy threat; they’re doing the equivalent of spying on mail and tapping phones. ”

“ Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought.
This clash of values has been fraught with controversy. Many hackers of the 1960s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long guerilla war against the uptight mainframe-computer "information priesthood." These computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard for access to computing power, and many of them were not above certain, er, shortcuts. ”

“ Still, talented hackers may become real assets to corporations. They’ll care infinitely more about your computer system—and all its quirks—than will programmers working nine to five for the money alone. Just a little oversimplistically it’s been said that you can befriend a hacker merely by supplying a computer with enough RAM, encouragement, a long leash, and lots of chow mein. ”

“ Many "underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz," who might break copy protection and pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system.
It is hard to estimate the true population of the digital underground. There is constant turnover. Most hackers start young, come and go, then drop out at age 22—the age of college graduation. And a large majority of "hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while never actually joining the elite. ”

“ Nappies also tended to abuse good phreaking and hacking techniques, which might cause Telecom to close up security holes. The result was that IS had a circulation of just three people.
To a non-hacker, IS looked like gobbledygook—the phone book made more interesting reading. But to a member of the computer underground, IS was a treasure map. A good hacker could follow the trail of modem phone numbers and passwords, then use the directions in IS to disappear through secret entrances into the labyrinth of forbidden computer networks. ”

“ This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. ”

“ One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage of `nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also called `turbo nerd', `turbo geek'. See also {propeller head}, {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}. ”

“ I suppose hackers are innocent of that too.
BY AND LARGE YES. PEOPLE THAT WRITE VIRUSES AND INFECT COMPUTERS ARE THE COMPUTER EQUIVALENT TO SERIAL KILLERS. OR HOW ABOUT THE GUY WITH AIDS, WHO KNOWS HE'S GOT IT AND SCREWS AS MANY PEOPLE AS HE CAN TO SPREAD IT AROUND. VIRUSES ARE DANGEROUS AND DEMENT- ED. NO HACKER OF THE CODE WOULD DO THAT. You keep mentioning this code. What is the code?
IT'S A CODE OF ETHICS THAT MOST OF US LIVE BY. AND IT'S CRUCIAL TO A STABLE UNDERGROUND CULTURE THAT SURVIVES BY ITS WITS. IT GOES LIKE THIS: NEVER INTENTIONALLY DAMAGE ANOTHER COMPUTER. That's it? ”

“ Local units also arrested a 19-year-old female phone phreak named "Electra" in Pennsylvania, and a male juvenile in California. Federal agents however were not seeking arrests, but computers.
Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in their seized computers is evaluated—a process that can take weeks, months—even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot, it's generally an arrest for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during Sundevil) . ”

“ Whatever the truth, it seems to be well hidden under the guise of politics. There is mounting evidence and concern that computer viruses and computer hackers are endangering the contents of our computers. ”

“ This exhortation was popularized by William Shatner on a "Saturday Night Live" episode in a speech that ended "Get a *life*!", but some respondents believe it to have been in use before then. It was certainly in wide use among hackers for at least five years before achieving mainstream currency in early 1992.
:Get a real computer!: /imp./ Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that (a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c) has an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. ”

“ One person's creative subversion of authority is another person's security headache, after all. Even so, the central taboo against malicious or deliberately harmful behavior remains strong enough that most hackers prefer to use the term "cracker"—i.e., a person who deliberately cracks a computer security system to steal or vandalize data—to describe the subset of hackers who apply their computing skills maliciously.
This central taboo against maliciousness remains the primary cultural link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the 1950s. ”

“ The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity, the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. ”