What are real hackers?

What are real hackers?
What are real hackers suppose to do? Are they supposed to find errors in software for other people and then try to fix them or report them. That sounds like a beta tester or support tech to me. And if I want to be that then I would of just got a job doing that. And you would not get into trouble doing that.
Are real hackers supposed to break into websites or computers defacing them or destroying them. That sounds like a computer terrorist or scrip kiddy to me. And that is not what I want to be.
I think a real hacker is some one that looks at their situation and see how they can make it better. For example lets say you are at school and you wanted to save things to the hard drive so you could print it off later but the school has installed a program that wont let you save to the hard drive. What should you do? Should you let it pass and forget about it or should you try to get around it and hack the system and save any way.
I would hack the system and do what you need to do because it is not going to hurt anything if you do. But if you are caught then you get expelled from school.
Here is another example. What if you saved stuff on a schools computer or at work and you forgot to save it to disk. And when you got home you found out that to complete the assignment you need that thing you saved to the hard drive but forgot to save to the disk. What are you going to do know? Are you going to say forget about it and get a bad grade or get fired for not getting your stuff done. Or are you going to hack into the network and get it from the hard drive and finish your project. That is exactly what I would.
There is a million more examples that I could give but I think you get the idea. Hackers should hack for personal gain and not hurt any one in the process. Unless some scrip kiddy just wont let off then you should just let them have it. Butt there is never a good reason to ever rune a computer.
When I say personal gain I mean by improving your knowledge or help you get things done. Some people think that if we are out for personal gain maybe we should hack into banks and transfer funds. I personally think that is wrong because that is just stilling from people hard earned money. But if it was like Bill Gates you could always trick him in just doing it him self. That would be a true Hacker that really could get things done.
Some people may not agree with every thing. But I am not here to please people. I am here to learn and achieve my goals. Like making my own OS, Games and Software.

Sorry man but I hadnt any new or inspiring text to put up here, not even a damn debate. Anyway maybe just some light reading for others. Oh well.
;)


Types of Hackers

In a new era of hacking it is vitally important for the older generation to keep a sense of ethics and values alive, or we may simple add to the media's 'negative' view of hackers.
It is therefore the reason I have chosen to add an ethics section here.
Hopefully by introducing the many types of hackers in the world you can choose the right type and understand what a true hacker is.
I wont begin with the obvious dictionary defination of a hacker [seeker of knowledge etc.] but try to introduce the attitude of various stereotyped hackers.
However in my opinion real hackers come under no defination and are just people interested in computers regardless of whether they spend years learning the finer points of programming or years gaining root on a lame admins system.

There are many names for different classes of hackers.

The Script Kiddie
* Lamers
* These 'hackers' or wannabes manipulate tools written by others to achieve respect. At the moment I would consider there presence as widespread. They give hackers a bad name and usually use trojans [RATS].
How often have you been on IRC and felt their presence, SUB7 scans are their usual tactic as well as the infamous DoS attacks.
* It is these Script Kiddies who have demised the respectful name of hackers into the anti-media tag it carries today.
* In my humble opinion Virii users come under this category but not in the case of those who have personally written the virus.
* Do not fall under this category if you want true respect.
* Often use Windows and AOL and try to hack hotmail.

Newbies/Neophytes
* Next generation of hackers
* These are the learners of the hacking world, their main aim is to gain knowledge.
* They begin as script kiddies often indulging in such activities but quickly learn it is lame.
* Most have the respect from elders as they want to learn and avoid the simplicity of simply becoming a script kiddie.
* It is a joy to see such people grow as they install Linux and no longer get flamed on BBS boards, it is these people who are the future of hacking.

The l33t
* Average Hackers
* The use of numbers and symbols in hacker culture is becoming lame but is the way for a small generation of hackers who are usually fairly good hackers who never become too serious but have a general understanding of computers. You know the type who write like this 5h1+ 1m l33t ¬0w m0+h3rfu<3r5.
* May indulge in defacement for message purposes.
* Are known to get involved in hacker wargames.
* Usually have websites with good grafix.

BBS and Warez d00ds
* The current generation of hackers are BBS boys , they spend long amounts of time reading and posting on message boards learning and passing on knowledge.
* There are numerous old boards with great history and new ones are appearing everyday.
* Usually they are fairly large communities and at times get involved in long flame wars with newbies, script kiddies and lamers.
* Helpful at times.
* It is important that people realise many highly known boards are visited by FBI etc. to keep tabs on the latest exploits, defacements etc.


Crackers
* Also known as Black Hats
* These guys come in two forms, Software crackers who get programs for free like warez d00ds and the evil BlackHat crackers.
* True Crackers are intelligent guys, they can in essence hack and can easily bypass security.
* They are not to be mistaken with script kiddies as true crackers know their stuff, they dont use other peoples tools and are usually as smart as an ethical WhiteHat hacker.
* The old age debate of Hacker/Cracker has been well-reviewed and it is true that the media should technically use the word cracker when describing people who have stolen credit card numbers or so on.

The Ethical/True Hacker/WhiteHat
* The real elite [not l33t].
* Well these guys are the people who arent really around any more, they are the people who once hacked but probably stopped due to the upsurge of lame script kiddies of today. They are not in large numbers these days so if you know one keep with him or her and you will learn
* Programmers with many languages
* Unix or Linux experts.
* Respected members of the hacking community.
* Helpful and non-destructive.
*

Here is the list of White Hat rules taken from a tutorial by

z0nic
with info by Carolyn MyAnal
Ascii Work by -IceCanibus
who are apart of the r00t-access crew.
"
-Thou shalt respect knowledge and freedom of information above all else in cyberlife. Thou shalt respect all systems and treat them as you would treat your own.
-Thou shalt develop an addiction to knowledge, gaining it all the time and taking pride in new knowledge you have gained and can shre with others in your own name.
-Thou shalt only take credit for things you have discovered yourself and give FULL credit to all revisions.
-Thou shalt not hack systems to profit from any information contained within.
-Thou shalt not damage or modify or make copies
of any system whatsoever With exception to log
files which are advisable to prevent detection
-Thou shalt not make use of other peoples programs more than you make use of raw methods and invent your own.
-Thou shalt e-mail every sysadmin from an anonymous account to inform him/her of the flaws in the system and where he/she can download a patch, do not fix the system yourself.
-Thou shalt not intentionally harm a systems bandwidth and thou shalt not crash a system intentionally [including DoS]
-Thou shalt share thine knowledge freely, not profit from any knowledge and assist all people who require knowledge.
-Thou shalt not take stupid risks of yourself [or anybody else for that matter] on any system. This thine duty to keep all hackers out of prison.

" end of piece.

OK, back to me.

The Phreakers
* The trend of phreaking is nearly as old as hacking itself and is hacking in the sense that it involves love of technology, the want to learn how to understand communications.
* Many phreakers are legends in the world of hacking.
* Phreaking is fun and well respected if done correctly.

The Legends
* Famous crackers such as Kevin Mitnick whose jail term is a long webpage defacement issue. More recently Rapheal Gray and of course the infamous MOD group with such legends as Phiber Optik and the LOD group.
* There is another text on famous crackers so lets not go into this now.

The Lost
* These guys are like myths and are known as GreyHats, they are excellent hackers with the ability to hack many of the worlds greatest systems but dont and are said to be the old hackers who no longer speak.
* If they exist they are good as although Great Hackers get the feds at their door or go to jail Truly Great Hackers are never caught....

Nice post ennis. Very informative too for both the senior and newbie alike. Good job ;)

I'm not sure the term 'hacker' should be considered a compliment anymore, because all you read about in newspapers are that 'hackers' recked a page or flamed some company's network. The media has given the term a bad image. I would come up with some witty politically correct term to define the people out there that intend no *permanent harm* but I guess I just can't be bothered right now.

Welp.. If someone called me a hacker, it wouldn't affend me and I'd take it as a compliment. Generally, when I tell someone that, I explain to them the white-hat system and that I am a white-hat hacker. So, I wouldn't be in shame of saying that.

I think once you hit a certain point, terms like Hacker or 1337 loose all meaning, because you grow out of the need to have a label, you simply are what you are, no words or labels required. I know who I am, what I can do, what I want to learn and do, and pretty much could care less about ever being known by any of the trems listed in Ennis' post, though I must applaud him on the info.

Good content ennis.

Hmmm... It sorta gives you something to strive for! I hope one day to contribute to something great in the hacking... I just haven´t found it yet! :)

BTW Hackers is beyond definition! It is when your passion for something grows so deep, that it devours your soul, and you are not able to leave for anything else but this one thing which truely has your interest! And it could be anything, stamps, cars, airplanes, computers, anything at all! And you know you are a hacker once you know all there is to know about the subject!

nice Ennis long time since I have seen everything said that well
Makes me miss my few days as a The Script Kiddie trying to fig everything out :)
I should send a copy of this out to a bunch of news networks maybe get them to use a another term other then hacker. Even thought I have grown to no even care what is said about me and what I do hacker is too broad to tell about everything in comp peeps do not like. I had friends in high school who made one change on a school comp like change the backgroud of something and were labeled and had problems because if it. I could go on and on but I think im getting off topic.

Great post Enris.

TYrue, most of the stuff most of us know, but its always always good to see such a bundled up package of very well-written information.

As ashbourn says, this post needs to be sent to a few media and security newsgroups, just to let them know too. :)

Again, a very well-written piece.

Cheers!

Quote:

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Hackers should hack for personal gain and not hurt any one in the process.

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My brother has cancer and we don't have insurance. It costs $50,000 for the treatment he needs. Do I hack the bank to get it? No one will be hurt because the money is insured by the government.

Breaking the law is breaking the law. Violating system use policy is still wrong, no matter what your purpose. Hacking (originally) was done for knowledge, not for personal gain. It was to learn, not to make life easier on yourself. You need to save infromation at school, take a freakin floppy disk and leave the harddrive alone. You forget some information at work, go back and get it. Your examples showed hacking from being lazy, not for any other purpose.

Also, something not pointed out by Ennis (welcome back by the way). The term hacker didn't come from suberting systems. It came from an ingenius idea on how to get something to work the way you needed it to. If you need to add numbers to a list of 5000 items and write a program to do it, thats a hack. If you want your SW radio to pick up more frequencies so you modify it, thats a hack. If your muffler falls off your car and you wire it up with a clothes hanger...thats a hack. If you dl a program so you can break into your work system, thats just being a lazy script kiddie.

Quote:

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Also, something not pointed out by Ennis (welcome back by the way). The term hacker didn't come from suberting systems. It came from an ingenius idea on how to get something to work the way you needed it to. If you need to add numbers to a list of 5000 items and write a program to do it, thats a hack. If you want your SW radio to pick up more frequencies so you modify it, thats a hack. If your muffler falls off your car and you wire it up with a clothes hanger...thats a hack. If you dl a program so you can break into your work system, thats just being a lazy script kiddie.

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Amen to that, brother!

Hello Everyone,

Boy it's been a long time since my last post!

Has anyone read the book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen?

It’s not like an Internet text (Although I’m sure you might find some excerpts) it’s an actual book from the bookstore…and it’s not like a “how to hack” kind of book… it’s actually a sociological view of the “Hacker Ethic”. It makes a lot of comparisons to Weber’s essay on the protestant work ethic (Perhaps some of you might have heard about him in your SOC101 classes).

Anyways, the prologue was written by Linus Torvalds (I hope that name sounds familiar) and is REALLY good. And in fact if you do a little background reading on Weber and some of the other sociology topics discussed in the book, it will help you appreciate what the rest of the book has to say.

Happy Hunting!!

Simon Templer :)

Ok hacking means to wrights programs or hack at the keyboard to it don’t matter what you think it means. It started at MIT by some geeks and that is all hacking is. But the way every one is using the term it means to break the law and there is no way around it. And to me braking stupid laws put in place by stupid old people is ok. Because it reality you are not really doing any thing and if any body actually trust a computer has to be crazy because you need energy to run that computer. So when there is no energy to run the computer or you cant afford to but that energy then all you have is a pill of crap that can’t do any thing. So reality the only thing that is worth doing is farming because that is were every thing is coming from because no food no people. And no people no reason to have computers. So you can say hay you hacked the power grid and shut all the electricity off. So what are we just a bunch of pusses that can’t handle anything? As for me I have lived with out things until I was 18 and I know that all this uha about this **** is just that ****.
I would hack a bank to save my bro I would kill the president to save my bro because I am no pussy.
By the way if you are wondering I have no recorded of any kind I have never got into trouble what so ever.
I think a real hacker is a person that just knows how to read and switch switches and that is all hackers are there not philosophers or “gods” there just people who want to get free stuff. You can accept or not but it’s true non-the less.

The freedom to express your self.

Damned good post, Ennis...easy to see why you have been so badly missed!

Hey Templer,
Its a good read, its full title is The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Its quite good especially reading about ethics from Linus' point of view but the comparisions to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism are a little overdone. Anyhow good book if youre looking for a read all.

;)

I love that book. It is truly a very good read and I recommend it to loads of people.

Wow, :eek:

I'm surprised that their were actually people that have read it!!

I remember I found it in the clearence section of a Walden Bookstore for like $5.

Ennis,

When I first read the book, I agree that Himanen's went a little overboard when compared to Linus' Prologue, but then I realized that, that was the entire point of the book (Or at least thats what I thought) I think the comparisons were neccessary to show the differences between the motivations of the "normal" individual and the "hacker".

I got it as a present Simon for Christmas believe it or not.

Yeah I suppose it is a worthy comparision if not a little unorthodox.

Well personally I have always beleaved in the 'OLD SCHOOL' form of hacking. To me it was never about security. Back in the old days peaple made thier own computers and they made their own programs to run these computers and they would share info, code, & (ect.). But now days hacking means makeing and/or breaking security.

Yes that is so true.
I never like buying name brand computers I get the parts and put it together my self and then get the software that I want and put it on and if there is software that I cant get I will code it my self. So far it has been little stuff but I will learn how to make bigger stuff as time goes on and I learn more in my computer classes.
I think people take computers to seriously. If a computer gets to hot it will no longer work so why rely on something that will brake easily.
I mean what the heck we are worried about people breaking into computers and getting info that you don’t wont them to get. But they can only get info that is already public any way.

very nice post ennis

Hello everybody

"Hackers" is the most commonly used word for everybody who can do things that a normal users can't.Everybody thinks that Hackers are "nerds" who wear glasses and sit behind a pc using linux or unix and launch nuclear missiles or something like that.We should ask ourselves why does this happens?
the question is: "****in TV"
I am sure we all watch movies where the hero is a "hacker" who can turn the world upside down in front of a pc's screen.And why do they that?
Because nobody would like to watch a movie where a "hacker" would be trying to find weaknesses in a new operating system for example.
M A R K E T I N G changed the world
MARKETING is the real "hacker" of our world

Thanx for reading
World Can't Change

Great Post Ennis

I did like the post Ennis... Very Zen like :D
For : Kingpinz..
What you call "Getting free stuff" 95% of the rest of us call stealing... There are "stupid laws passed by stupid old people" just becasue of people like you... If it weren't people like you the rest of us would not need locks... Grow up son and try this real cool way of getting stuff... They call it a job... Just my $.02 :p