Posted on July 28th, 2010 by Thomas Brewster
Oh no, I think I’m a hacker!
Journalists and hackers, while they both have very different aims, are not too dissimilar in their working methods.
This was my realisation about ten minutes into a Stonesoft Hack The Lab event held today where attendees were invited to compromise a fictitious website.
Both journos and hackers start off their projects by selecting a target before moving on to gather related information. For the latter activity, both look through the raft of data that can be found on newspapers, magazines, websites and from available contact details.
Then, in admittedly very different ways, writers and cyber criminals alike look to pick holes in their target, finding vulnerabilities to attain their respective goals.
Of course, this is where the similarity ends. Journalists go ahead and write up a story, while hackers can do a range of different, possibly illicit, things such as leaving backdoors or covering their tracks (the last thing journalists want to do is hide their identity – quite the opposite in fact).
While the comparison is not entirely accurate, it hints at something more important: anyone can be a hacker – something that was proved by my visit to Hack the Lab.
Stonesoft’s Alan Cottom said at the very beginning of the meeting that many companies still consider intrusion prevention to be something of a “dark art”. The aim of Hack the Lab is to show how simple compromising a system can be if the right protection is not in place, a sentiment that Stonesoft has expressed to clients through such events before.
Cottom guided us through hacking a fake company named City Burger. All that was required were some instructions, a range of easily downloadable tools (I won’t name them from fear of promulgating the the threat of DIY cyber crime) and, admittedly, some help from the guys in the know.
Having gathered some info on the site, we eventually got hold of an old email with some password details on. Eventually, after discovering where the password went, a couple of attendees (my skills are still lacking… perhaps for the good of the world) were able to take control of a compromised system and carry out commands from that. Simple really.
What is clear though, is that with the right protection in place and a sensible password strategy (check out our guide on how to create a solid one), companies stand a much better chance of blocking wannabes like myself… well at least the self I was a few hours before writing this.
I’ve now gone clean after tasting the dark side. I am officially a reformed hacker.
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July 30th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
If you didn’t alter any code, then you were simply a cracker. It’s the others who were hackers.
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:16 am
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