The hacker mindset doesn’t actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim.
Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.
I’m still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.
When an attacker fails with one person, they often go to another person. The key is to report the attack to other departments. Workers should know to act like they are going along with what the hacker wants and take copious notes so the company will know what the hacker is trying to find.
I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access.
No way, no how did I break into NORAD. That’s a complete myth. And I never attempted to access anything considered to be classified government systems.
Both social engineering and technical attacks played a big part in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when it was appropriate, and exploited technical vulnerabilities when it was appropriate.
No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses. Sun didn’t stop using Solaris and DEC didn’t stop using VMS.
I saw myself as an electronic joy rider.
I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.
Choosing a hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember password is important!
Some people think technology has the answers.
Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company’s internal jargon.
Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause.
All they need to do is to set up some website somewhere selling some bogus product at twenty percent of the normal market prices and people are going to be tricked into providing their credit card numbers.
New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing.
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government’s false claims.
For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.
I believe in having each device secured and monitoring each device, rather than just monitoring holistically on the network, and then responding in short enough time for damage control.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.