H4ck3rz

I am learning an awful lot about computer security awfully fast. I hadn’t wanted to “go there,” but circumstances have dictated it. I always kept my ears open on that front, but now I have to learn the holes of networking, NT, and UNIX, and learn to plug them. Learning to use the tools to document and analyze these holes is a mind-numbing experience.

See, it’s like viruses. Ever notice how viruses are such a flying waste of time? It’s a waste of time for people to write them. It’s a waste of time for those people to disseminate them to flunkie 12 year olds with internet access. It’s a waste of time for these kids to go around spreading them. It’s a waste of time for companies to make virus cleaners. It’s a waste of time for me to install them and run them and keep them up to date. It’s a waste of time because NOTHING productive is happening anywhere in all of that activity.

I think it’s the same with the security racket. Look, people who call themselves hackers are just wasting everyone’s time. They claim that they are helping expose the weaknesses that some “unethical” hackers would exploit so that administrators can fix the problems before they cause damage. Excuse me? If a company doesn’t take steps to protect itself, it means one thing: they have established a trade-off in how much security they have against how much security they need. That’s important kids; read it again if you didn’t catch it. If a company like the one I work for is so “un-sexy” as to not warrant a lot of security, why waste our time preventing an attack?

Nevertheless, people who truly know what they are doing tell everyone else how to do it, like a teenager who finally has sex for the first time, so that they can finally make a claim to fame. Then all the 12 year olds get on Dad’s new PC and launch attacks at indiscriminate sites for fun. There’s nothing productive going on here either, folks. And it’s hypocrisy to say that there is. Take a lesson, “hackers,” go work on Linux. Develop KOffice. Make a freeware game like Quake. Do something – anything – but do something productive.