From: Ryan M Gill (rmgill@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Sep 06 2002 - 13:53:53 PDT
At 4:29 PM -0400 9/6/02, J. Forster wrote:
> > The hacker community isn't out to destroy the world. They are
>there to learn
>> and discover.
>
>Including those who launch destructive virii ?? I don't think so. Some may be
>white hats, some are black, some checkered.
"Remember that tank that that person had in San Francisco? Thats why
civilians shouldn't have military vehicles...!" I can't believe you'd
fall for that.
There are many legitimate reasons for people to "hack". From the
standpoint of understanding security, learning how systems are secure
and how they work in general. Most hackers if not all are out to
learn and understand things. They aren't out to steal state secrets
and destroy your computer. In some cases viruses that escape from
people are where someone is working on a program as an experiment and
it gets away from them. Others are in fact malicious. Have you ever
had a run-away Diesel? What kind of havoc can one of those cause if
it's in a public parking lot?
The problem with the general view that government has of hackers is
that they've been told by industry that "hackers are bad -umkay".
They get in and cause millions of dollars of damage. In many cases
what is now illegal is not unlike telling someone that their door is
open or that something is not working.
Some corporations are getting to the point that that if you find a
security hole in their software they label you a hacker and file suit
against you stating that you gained access to private information by
poking at their software. Law enforcement in general fears hackers
because they typically know squat about computers. They get a Federal
Agent saying that someone is dangerous and they believe. (Take that
IBM server computer that has been on TV recently, that's about how
local law enforcement understand computers...."server? Whats a
server?")
The best example of this was a hacker that gained access to a
document that explained the 911 system on the nations phone network.
The hacker was caught for something unrelated and it was charged that
the document was work some sum of money in the range of several tens
of thousands of dollars (makes it a felony to "steal" the document).
It turns out that you could order the document, in printed form, from
a phone company trade catalog for something on the order of $10.
Claims of damage in cases of Hacking are from my experience always
massively inflated. Typically the claims are made so that Law
Enforcement gets on board.
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