Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The Hacker Ethos

What makes the activity of Hacking so attractive to technical wizards.

When I was at the University of New South Wales studying for a Masters in Computer Science I had a acquaintance that was a fellow student that spent much of his time installing key-loggers on may of the campus's terminals and PCs. The passwords that he managed to obtain from this was then used to access other resources of the Universities systems.
I feel sure that he would be one of the visitors that continue to find this website in the search for ways to break into wireless networks.

The use of programs such as aircrack-ng have long been a study for me. This along with other methods used by hackers to gain access to systems such as web-servers, including my own.

I remain to be convinced that programs such as aircrack can be made to work in a simple and effective manner, especially on Windows 7 machines. There are other tools that I am pretty certain can be and are used to test the security and in some cases penetrate wireless systems. These programs are in most part too complex for the idle hacker to use. Also the fact that a system is penetrated does not mean that data or user security is put at risk if the users have taken precautions to keep their identities safe by other means. I believe that the case for wireless security, and many other forms of security, have been grossly over-blown.

I am not saying that programs such as Firesheep do not work - I am simply stating that it far more lucrative for companies to make you think that you are at risk and then sell you a solution to fix it.

I am also not saying that the "Security Profession" is not a noble cause, it is just too easy to spread fear that you are at risk when you possibly not.

In addition, when I see a list of the companies that "sponsor" Hacker Conventions I cannot help question the business models and feel that this is a case of modern-day McCarthyism.

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