Who Are the Hackers and What Do They Do - Case Study Example

The Difference between the hackers viewpoint about Table of Contents Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3 Who are the hackers and what do they do?----------------------------------------------------------------5 Why are they allegedly the bad people of the internet community?------------------------------------6 What is the hackers opinion on this allegations?----------------------------------------------------------8 What do the non-hacker community have to say about it?----------------------------------------------9 Conclusion----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10 Bibliography--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11 Introduction In today’s modern world where, technology has flourished so much, that all homes have more computers than at least one each, that student’s program like professional programmers, and that even exams are sometimes conducted online. people look to secure internet and personal information updation on their computers and even the internet. This leads to the need to forming the concept of secure websites, password sharing/non-sharing and password saving. All around, a new term has also sprung up, that of a certain class of programmers called hackers. They are acclaimed to be the ones breaking down everyone’s passwords and security clearances. They are highly despised and avoided. Being a hacker is a one-way ticket to being an outcast, both socially and morally. Here a few, more logical people would stop and think what the term hacker actually means. This term has several meanings. According to a webpage called THE JARGON FILE a hacker is: A person who loves working on the inner details of a computer and loves exploring it. A person who loves to program apart from course work or learning purposes. A person who likes hack value. A person who is an expert at working on a program. A person who enjoys creatively answering questions or forming solutions of many kinds and limitations. These points show that hackers are not just talented programmers but are also really intelligent people with a great IQ. But their presence has been marred by a similar, but little known class of separate computer geeks known as crackers. The website THE JARGON FILE identifies them as “Malicious meddlers who try to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, or network hacker.” Therein lies the whole mystery of the famous cyber war and confusion of the entire world, Crackers do it and hackers have to face the consequences. Crackers are the ones who love to look into people personal accounts all over the world by getting past security passes. And as people are not knowledgeable about it so they blame the poor hackers. Even the Encarta dictionary tells about the difference between them: “cracker is someone who is a computer user, and who gains unauthorized access, to a computer or system data, belonging to someone else, and hacker is somebody who is interested or skilled in computer technology and programming.” Hackers first got recognition in 19060s by the hacker culture around TMRC an the MIT labs. This term was used by teenage radio hams and electronic tinkerers in the mid-1950s. This community world-wide is very protective of their rights and cultures. And have many variant points on their work and how it affects the normal human community. The normal human community deems them unsafe. The many questions asked are , can hackers be trusted, do they do any good, how do we identify them. This paper will answer these questions while following the following points of interest: Who are the hackers and what do they do? Why are they allegedly the bad people of the internet community? What is the hackers opinion on this allegations? What do the non-hacker community have to say about it? Who are the hackers and what do they do The hackers are a community of highly intelligent people, who are intent on making the internet a better and friendlier place to be. All they require in return is unlimited access to all the possible internet they can have. But they certainly don’t in any way require that people’s most private dealing be exposed to them too. Nor do they in any way try and hack or crack people passwords and cookie settings. A hacker defends his community in his website by answering very rudely to people who ask how do they crack other people’s accounts on hotmails or yahoos. We all know that the hacker community came into existence a long time before the Microsoft community and will remain long after that too. They are solely responsible for the evolution of UNIX and LINUX. They like to work on problems faced the general internet community like, how can people contact each other in a more efficient and time-saving way on the internet, how can people learn programming, how can people spend an evening playing games on the computer. They may be the nerd type, but their knowledge and superior intelligence lets them to be happy about sharing their knowledge with the rest of the world. They are self-motivated and don’t like to take directions. They are recognized by few specific physical markers which include speaking code-language frequently, knowing the value of the hacker community, and the fact that they are called hackers by the hacker community. Hackers literally made the internet. They also made the UNIX operating system into what it is today. They made the World Wide Web work. They hacker mind-set is not only limited to the hacker-community alone. There are people who would take that knowledge and apply it to electronics and math, physics and biology. Hackers solve problems and are also responsible for building things, and they like to work in freedom from other’s orders. One needs to have an attitude of a hacker to be called one. Hackers have fun, no doubt but it comes at the cost of being outcasts for the rest of their term as hackers. Nevertheless this does not stop them from being themselves. They usually revel in the glory of being a hacker as this is a gate way to helping other people. Their fun also comes at the expense of lots of effort. Not just that, but motivated effort. The effort that comes from pushing their thinking, logic and brains to their limits. Creative brains have become the need-of-the-hour and are very valuable. They aren’t gotten easily so their efforts must be saved up. This is the believe of the hacker community and so they say, that any problem should be solved only once and only once. And anyone who solves a problem once should share it with others so their time and brain is not wasted in redoing it. Why are they allegedly the bad people of the society Hackers are usually heard say that information should be free and unlimited. Because they need to wok on problems and unless information is free they can’t possibly have any complete solutions. This claim alone is enough to make the community insecure of them and their intentions. The people would no doubt think the hackers would use their personal information to look at people’s security card numbers or their credit card numbers. Even if many hackers decline the claim, there have been many incidents of hackers actually using up all the credit card numbers and stealing the general community’s money. This leaves little room for much trust. People would never take a chance with their money as it it the one of the most precious things of this world. Also hackers can promote problem-solving flow, by free exchange of information, and that is done by having an open-system so hackers have no-boundaries between them and an info or an item of equipment. This creates bureaucracies between all the hackers and the general community and everyone gets effected. The true hacker is than hidden behind one who is intent on gathering power and then they take on the form of crackers who are highly dangerous to the public. An also the real nature of hackers become threatened. Many a times, it was seen from all the social forums of today, like facebook, and myspace, that fake profiles were created and they started talking to other people as someone else who is a friend. Of hackers, who cracked open a person’s account and then take over that person’s contact’s and this whole incident becomes a nuisance when that hacker starts to stalk the person. Therefore to many communities, the hackers are both untrustable, and uncountable people. Even despite all this there are a lot of communities which know and highly appreciate the hacker’s jobs and doings. These are highly well-known research labs who are willing to to start hacking as a good subject in many of the universities and institutes. They would love to change the stereotype of the hacker community so that they may be appreciated for all they have so far achieved which includes better programming systems and user-interfaces. Following are a few hacking incidents which left the people in awe. Whether they were good or bad depends on the reader: 1990s : Kevin Mitnick hacked into the systems of Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. FBI arrested him in 1995he never called his activity as hacking but only as social engineering. 2002: Gary McKinnon hacked onto 90 US military computers and was arrested in 2002 November. 1995: Vladimir Levin hacked onto a bank’s account to extract money and robbed $10 million. He got arrested by Interpol in late 19995 999: David smith wrote a virus named as Melissa Virus and that alone was responsible for a global damage to the companies all over the world.he was arrested and sent to prison for 5 years. 2000: MafiaBoy, hacked into eBay, Amazon and Yahoo. He also got access to around 75 compouter and ordered a Denial of Service attack on tem. He later got arrested in 2000. What is their opinion on these allegations Almost all of the hackers apart from the cracker community, believe that they are doing good to the community in general by solving problems. They say that they strictly follow the hacker’s ethical codes which clearly define that no hacker on any account is to take over any individual’s private information. We have a lot of incidents where the hacker community has gone to great lengths to take care of the societies technical needs and have spend nights answering related problems. These incidents include: Making an aero plane, which acted as dummy-drones and these could be tested for smaller attacks on a hostage-stricken buildings to draw tout the criminals. They said it was only for the betterment of the community. A hacker once thought that people needed to be sure at all times if their credit cards were safe or not. and so he developed a portable card swiper which could be bought and put in homes so that they could track if their cards had been stolen and who was using it and when. A few hackers figured a way to get a free-hostile card audit of IPEC implementations. What do the non-hacker community say about it According to a non-hackers account, in which the girl became a victim of a deadly hacker, the hacker had first followed nor on MSN and had started asking her strange questions. Thereafter she blocked him. After a while or so, her entire computer went in a shut down mode and all her data started getting lost. Even her documents on the computer started showing pictures of the guy all strewn across her desktop. So she had to reinstall the entire windows. She carried out some research on hacker and found that attitude towards them from the rest of the world was a mixture of curiosity, resentment, amazement, fear and hatred. There are hackers, people like her hacker who liked to kill time by ruining others time, and hackers, who make the internet safer for all the non-hacking people by blocking up the other hackers. People think that when there are other, better career options, why would anybody try and be hacker. Careers like, doctors, professors, writers, politicians. They think that hacking is a sheer waste of talent. Talent that can be used in engineering to help make new machinery. We can view the art of hacking also in the light that the non-hacking community also serves to better our computer interface all the time. The non-hackers appreciate the fact that the hackers are the sole reason as to why we advanced from assemble-based languages to high level languages. If it weren’t for them we would still in a black-hole of technological stone age. Conclusion Hackers have been and always will be there in our world. whether they’d be working for the good or the bad of our community is really up to us and them. If we keep out casting them as breachers of privacy and security. They will live up to their reputation. But we respect the fact that some of the are working for the betterment of the technological society and are advancing us each day, then maybe they’d actually become better. We live in a mixed up world and it is all out jobs to work to advance it. So it we work together each playing his own part can only we achieve a set of standard and peace that is good for this world. Bibliography Eric Steve Raymond: (2001) http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#hacker_already Jerrico Usher: How To Hack (legally) a Myspace Account AND Some incredible and Shocking information about hackers stealing accounts 82 http://hubpages.com/hub/Hacking-Myspace-Hack-codes---Bypass-any-user-entered-codes-for-anything The hacker ethic, (2005) : http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/textos/hacker_ethic.en.html The Jargon File: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html Hlin (2011): A gender view on the hacker community: http://gandt.blogs.brynmawr.edu/web-papers/web-papers-2/a-gendered-view-on-the-hacker-community/ Mike Szczkys ( Hack A Day, 2011): http://hackaday.com/2011/03/29/quadcopter-pair-plays-table-tennis-without-the-table/#more-38856 Top 10 hacking incidents of all time (2009): http://faq.programmerworld.net/programming/top-10-hacking-incidents-of-all-time.html Read More