with permission from the author Winn Schwartau - COO, The Security Experts, Inc.
A dear friend and security professional once said, "hackers are amoral sociopathic scum." I took issue with that statement. A former CIA-spy says that hackers are "a national resource to be cultivated, not persecuted," and that they will go down in history as the early warning system for Cyberspace.
I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that, regardless of one’s views, the Golden Age of Hacking is dead. Over. Finis. Kaput. The vast majority of those who call themselves hackers today are sad-sack-wanna-be’s who call push-button harassment hacking. Are they ever wrong.
In the late ‘60’s, we hacked. As computer students, we rekeyed the punch cards by adding a ‘minus sign’ to the left of the amount in our telephone and electric bills. To our amazement, we received monthly refunds for the amount of services we consumed. Yeah, we phone phreaked and blue-boxed and we also built our tools from scratch. We hacked the telephone systems with pieces of cardboard and made free calls to Istanbul, Sidney and Timbuktu. Now, I am not defending these activities, merely observing that we dove right into the technology, absorbed it and to a certain extent abused it. But we were good at it.
Along comes the late 70’s and 80’s and the first out-of-the-closet generation of computer hackers. Not the academics who intellectually challenged each other with practical jokes, but those who dove into the data bases, switches and backbones of Corporate America, the telephone company and the Government to see what was what. They poked, prodded, learned, and a great many of them broke the laws along the way. (No, I won’t say who…) But, by and large, they were a harmless lot who typed command line after complex string for weeks on end to ingratiate themselves with the host technology if not the systems administrators of the day.
Sure, they did some damage along the way, but it was comparatively minor compared to what many of them could have done if so inclined. The then-self-enforced Hacker Ethic prohibited the vast majority of early Cyberians from letting loose, preferring some degree of restraint so they could pursue their passion.
These hackers were pioneers. Pioneers of technology, of the very technology we use every day on our desktops, on the road and stuck to our ears or waistbands. They conquered the technology, then decided to improve upon it. Some people might say they chose to ‘get a life,’ but in fact, they found legitimate venues to express their technical skills, and continued their hacking, within somewhat narrower confines.
Some hackers hack nuclear weapons in classified programs for the government to see how safe they are from others who might not be so benign. Some hackers today legally hack into banks and airports and power companies and military systems as a first step in shoring up defenses against future invaders with less than benevolent intentions. Some design operating systems, applications and ways to squeeze additional performance out of existing hardware and infrastructure. To quote R. Buckminster Fuller, hackers are "ephemeralizers," who find unique ways to pound 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag… so to speak.
And that brings us to today. Now we find ourselves in a push-button, mouse-driven, icon-idealized desktop, where with a reasonably simple search mission on the ‘Net, one can quickly acquire hacking-tools which took a prior generation a decade of intensive effort to create.
These ultra-offensive weapons with grade-school interfaces empower the user to do tremendous damage if he/she so chooses. Without a sense of community, ethics or leadership, we are seeing children abuse the software handed to them freely by the Internet. We see massive concentrated strikes against certain sites because it’s "cool" and "hackers rule." Or, as Benjamin Netanyahu said with seeming pride about one of his country’s young hackers, "he is very good. And very dangerous."
I am so very disappointed in the current generation of self-proclaimed hackers who find more pleasure in raising havoc on the Internet than in improving it. They are not hackers; they are punks with a penchant for pushing buttons and an overextended right-index finger. Harassment is not a substitute for being technically adept. Malicious intrusion is not a replacement for self-education. Denial of Service is in no way equivalent to a casual skirting of ineffective password controls. And there is no way you can convince us that an undeveloped sense of responsibility is an excuse for the miscreant use of scanners, crackers and sniffers. The arrogance offered by so many of the new breed of ‘hackers’ is so ill-deserved as to be worthy of a good spanking.
Yes, the earlier generation of hackers did some minimal damage, and a handful of them gave the technical underground a bad name. But to me a hacker is someone who is creative, intelligent, ethical, dedicated, resourceful and technically sophisticated. I still consider the ultimate hack to have taken place during the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13. A box of random parts were dumped in from of a handful of engineers. "This is all you have to save their lives."
Today’s ‘hackers’ should be ashamed of themselves.