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<div align=justify>In the 1960’s at MIT a group of curious students, members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, decided to hack into the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. At this time hackers were encouraged to explore and were not considered malicious like the hackers the media portrays today. These groups of students were allowed access to the MIT AI Lab by the lab’s director Marvin Minsky.


In the 1970’s a trend started with phone hacking. Phreaks exploit phone systems to make free long distance calls. One famous phreak is John Draper, also known as “Captain Crunch”, made long distance calls for free by blowing a certain tone in a telephone. This tone opened a line on the phone system and he was able to make long distance calls for free. Two names that everyone is familiar with are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; these two gentlemen founded Apple Computer. However, what a lot of people did not know is that they were members of Homebrew Computer Club. While being members of this club they began making “blue boxes”, which are devices used to help phreaks access phone systems. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had handles that they were known by and they were “Berkley Blue” and “Oak Toebark”.

By the late 1980’s computer hacking had grown so much that a magazine was formed called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. This magazine shares tips on phone and computer hacking. The government responds to this growth by passing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and forming the Computer Emergency Response Team. This gives the government more authority in tracking wily hackers. This about the same time that the Media did a lot of coverage on Kevin Mitnik, a well known computer hacker who was convicted of stealing software and was sentenced to one year in prison.

By the 1990 the instances were computers were hacked grew exponentially. Due to the fact that there are more and more hacker tools available. The Hacker community shares a lot of ideas and tools on websites devoted to hacking. They also attend conferences like Def Con which is held in Las Vegas every year. Hackers and Security experts alike attend this conference. ISS (Internet Security Systems) is a security company based in Atlanta. They send 4-5 people to this conference every year. ISS has a group called X-Force that is made up of hackers that infiltrate themselves into the hacker community to learn what new vulnerabilities are being discovered. This is so they can be one step ahead and get the customer’s systems patched before anyone is able to exploit it.

However, the media has given hackers a bad reputation. Many people hear the word “Hacker” and they automatically think of some punk kid with nothing better to do but break in and destroy other people’s property. There are three main groups of hackers. There are the white hat hackers, black hat hackers (aka Crackers), and Script Kiddies.

White hat hackers are the security experts who are fighting the cyber warfare on a daily basis. These guys are the ones protecting our systems from the hackers who are out to destroy or steal. They are also the hackers that hack just for the knowledge they can get from doing so. They are not trying to take or destroy anything. Usually if they gain access to something then the will let the company know about the vulnerability before someone with less integrity finds it and has access.


Black hat hackers are the ones with criminal intent. The hacker community tried to save the “hacker reputation” by calling these people “Crackers” for criminal hackers. The term never caught on to mainstream and the media so the term “Hacker” still has a negative connotation attached to it. The media still lumps the good and bad together by calling them all hackers. A lot of Crackers are usually hired to for corporate or government vulnerabilities. They make money buy selling information in which they have stolen. These are sometimes members or of ties to organized crime groups.


Before we move on to the third type of hacker, which is the Script Kiddies, I want to also bring up the fact that there is also a sub-category that is between the black and white hat hackers. These are known in the cyber world as “Gray-hat Hackers”. They are security specialists by day and black hat hackers by night. There are not as many in this group as the other groups because a lot of security firms have very strict policies about the integrity of their workers. ISS for instance has a no tolerance policy. If any of their security personnel is even accused of hacking they are fired on the spot. They may or may not be guilty, but they still get fired. A lot of security firms take this stand and pay well enough that their employees do not want to risk their livelihood to hack for fun. Besides they get to hack legally.


Script Kiddies are another story all together. Where white and black hat hackers are very knowledgeable about programming and networking, script kiddies know just enough o be dangerous. Script Kiddies are also known as cyber-punks are usually kids who get bored in school and use there technical knowledge to deface websites, write simple bugs in Visual Basic that can cause a lot of havoc on systems around the world. An example of this is the “I Love You Bug” which corrupted millions of systems back in 2000. The culprit was a 23 year old man from the Philippines. My husband, Terry Nelms, who is a member of ISS X-Force, says that the “ILoveYou” bug was written in Visual Basic which is one of the first programming languages taught in a lot of colleges. I j\know I took it even as a business major at the State University of West Georgia. This was a required class for all business majors. When the media covers a story regarding hackers it is usually about Script Kiddies. Script Kiddies are usually caught very easily because they brag on hacker websites about what they have done. The government and security companies monitor all known hacker sites for this reason. Egos play a large in the reason these hackers get caught.

Individual pc users are not as vulnerable as company networks. It is wise to invest in some security software for your home pc even thought the threat of them accessing your files is low. The reason for this is because they can use your IP address and link to other computers. The more times they do this the harder it is for law enforcement and security experts to track them down. It buries the real perpetrator deep in the system.

Hackers in general are not dangerous. They just are reaching into the unknown trying to see what can be discovered. I applaud the hacker community for their intelligence and creativity that seems to have no bounds. What I do not like is the malicious intent of the Black Hat Hackers and Script Kiddies who are out to destroy and cause problems. It is sad to see that talent and intelligence being wasted on criminal activities. However, the largest concern is about Black Hat Hackers that may be linked to terrorist cells. Our culture today depends so much on computers that Internet Security is very important.</div>


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