Whether a
white hat hacker or a black hat hacker, “hackers gonna hack.” Now not all
“hackers” are out for personal gain for to wreak havoc, but I do submit that
whether white or black, they are addicted to hacking.
Password cracking
While
researching the addictive nature of hacking, I found a fascinating article on
password cracking and how Nate Anderson spent a good portion of his day trying
to crack a list of passwords to see how easy it actually could be. Anderson
logs his experiment on arstechnica.com in his article How
I Became a Password Cracker. The article chronicles Anderson’s journey from
never cracking a password to successfully cracking 8,000 passwords and the
details of how he accomplished it.
The addict
There is no
doubt in my mind that password cracking or security cracking is addictive. Like
Sudoku or a puzzle app that you just cannot put down until its solved, cracking
is a similar kind of “just cannot put it down.”
At the end of
his password-cracking day, Anderson stated, “Password cracking proved
surprisingly addictive—it's the ultimate mathematical puzzle, a lock that can
be picked with only a single precise key that you have to uncover from a pile
of billions of similar keys. Finding the fastest way to sort this pile is the
game, and it takes only hours to learn. But mastering it is the real challenge,
and you don't need to be a dark-hearted black hat to fall for it. After all,
what true puzzle lover would be content with cracking only half the hashes?”
And there you
have it . . . “what true puzzle lover would be content with cracking only half
the hashes?” I cannot even tell you how many times I have been sucked into some
sort of puzzle and just couldn’t stop until it was finished!
Kevin Mitnick
addiction
Starting his
social engineering and cracking early in life, Mitnick bypassed the Los Angeles
bus system and cracked into Digital Equipment Corporation’s operating system
all before he turned 17. It is believed that his 8 months in solitary
confinement was due to law enforcement officials believing that Mitnick was
able to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone."
In a statement
to the U.S. Senate Committee upon Mitnick’s release, he expounded on the
motivating factor behind his security hacking. “It was quest for knowledge, it
was the thrill, and there was the intellectual challenge. And [with] a lot of
the companies I targeted, to get the software was simply a trophy. I'd copy the
code, store it on the computer and go right on to the next without even reading
the code.” Could Kevin Mitnick ever be fully free from this cracking addiction?
The answer is
no. Today, Mitnick’s cracking has turned to white hat hacking. Mitnick is now
the owner of his own company, Mitnick Security Consulting LLC. Mitnick Security
Consulting LLC is a place where you can hire a white hat hacker to expose the
weaknesses in the security that is protecting sensitive data. Even though he is
not partaking in an illegal form of security cracking, Mitnick is still on the
“quest for knowledge,” seeking the “thrill.”
Let’s hear
from you, would you be for or against hiring out such a company to expose the
weaknesses in security system?
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