"HACKER ETHIC"
White Hat - Grey Hat - Black Hat Hackers
Curious if Unconventional Researchers
The terms hack and hacker originated in the 1950s at The Model Railroad Club at the MIT.
"FREE AS AIR, FREE AS WATER, FREE AS KNOWLEDGE"
"In fall 1984, at the first Hackers' Conference, I said in one discussion session: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." That was printed in a report/transcript from the conference in the May 1985 *Whole Earth Review*, p. 49.
It quickly became one of the elements of Hacker Ethics. Note that this refers to the original use of the term 'hacker', as programmer, not as cracker.
"Hacker Ethic" the passionate pursuit of knowledge. They share the basic interests of how things work, and how to break them as well as fix them [Hacking] keeps you on your toes.The original meaning of the word hacker: someone who enjoys stretching the capabilities of a system and solving hard problems. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Eric Raymond's article about ``The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture'' makes clear the difference:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/ar01s06.html
Real hackers have given us Unix and Emacs and the Macintosh and apache and BSD and Linux and sendmail and numerous other high quality gifts, because that's what they enjoy and that's how they build their reputations.
1983 Hacker "one who gains unauthorized access to computer records" from slightly earlier tech slang sense of
1976 Hacker " one who works like a hack at writing and experimenting with software, one who enjoys computer programming for its own sake," reputedly coined at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1984 Hack (v.) "illegally enter a computer system" is first recorded
- Hacktivists - "hacktivism," hacking with an ethical or political end, they are not cyberterrorists
- "Crackers" the dark-side, hackers who illegally break into systems to vandalize them
- Phreaks - people who hack the telephone system.
- Cyberpunk - a subgenre of science fiction focussing on computer and technological undergrounds in dystopian anarchocapitalist futures.
- Cypherpunk - a movement devoted to using networking technology and strong encryption to grasp freedoms denied by oppressive governments.
- Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
- The annual Las Vegas hacker convention called Def Con was founded by Jeff Moss in 1993.
Quotes for inspiration:
"They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a communist;
They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist;
They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader;
They came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me."
"Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. "
The only real difference between hacking and Quality Assurance is that a QA engineer generally gets compensated for finding flaws in a product before the general public (and our hacker kindred) have the opportunity to. Flaws that QA engineers work around or take for granted, when shipped to the consumer, become vulnerabilities that any halfway decent hacker can exploit.
"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."
RICHARD STALLMAN FREEDOM FIRST: Unethical Products that restrict freedom.
HDTV plot to control technology available to the public. After 2013 Analog video outputs will be forbidden and won't be allowed to be manufactured.
Free software movement started in 1983 by Richard Stallman. Freedom and community are the moral goals of software freedom. He wrote version gnu 1, 2, and now 3 with the help of a contract lawyer. GNU public License protects the freedom on every user. Free computer programs - copyright vs. copyleft.
Facism: Gov't toadies to big business Disney, Intel, Sony, Microsoft conspiracy.
Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing - Discussion on ethical hacking and penetration testing subjects.
2007 World's Most Ethical Companies
This ranking arose from an evaluation of "more than 5,000 companies across 30 separate industries looking for true ethical leadership" in areas such as litigation and conflict resolution, corporate citizenship, pan-industry participation, and governance. Includes a description of methodology, a list of winning companies, and brief additional material about selected winners.
You Can Work For The Feds
2006 Hackers can work for the Feds - NO DEGREE REQUIRED
Traditional requirements like college degrees and polygraph tests were no longer strictly required for government employment. They also said security clearances are being approved quickly. FBI combats criminal hackers, fraud and abuse.
The government is streamlining its process of attracting hacking talent and has hired several people without degrees. "Very gifted" have the chance of being hired even without a high-school degree.
The government is willing to accept people gaining skills away from schools.Many employees, contractors and even people in the seniorexecutive service do not have degrees.
Becoming a contractor first is the "easiest and quickest" way to eventually getting a government job and said 60% of
his organization is composed of contractors. Government hiring procedures often can be "slow and antiquated" and working with contractors sometimes is the only option to complete a critical job, It can take "two to three years" for that position to be created.
Hires can receive an interim secret clearance in about 3 to 4 weeks. According to Christy, the interim check consists of a "quick little" background inquiry and a check for warrants and
convictions. "
Strict polygraph requirement only exists at some agencies - like the NSA. Polygraphs are usually not required for other government agencies polygraphs are not required for most secret level jobs. Everyone doesn't have to be polygraphed. In certain programs, up to 90% are not polygraphed.
Other factors that could disqualify an applicant are financial problems and drug use. Financial responsibility is the "number one" disqualifier, but Christy adds that drug use is also a major disqualifier. "If you used drugs in the last year, you would probably be precluded.
Mark Loveless, a.k.a. “Simple Nomad” Hacker for 25 years, is a Senior Security Analyst at BindView Corporation. Mark works on the company’s highly regarded RAZOR Research Team. He is also the founder of the Nomad Mobile Research Center, an international group of hackers that explore technologies. He has spent years developing and testing security strengths for a broad range of computer systems. He has also authored numerous papers, tools and articles, all dealing with the computer security and insecurity. Mark is a frequently sought lecturer at security conferences and industry events around the globe. He has been quoted in print, online and television media outlets regarding computer security and privacy.
Interview with Marcus Ranum 06/29/05
Marcus Ranum replies:
> I'm wondering why you say 'hackers' instead of >'crackers'... thats who is causing problems...
Crackers, hackers, as*holes, you can call 'em whatever you like. Did you understand what I was saying? Then let's not worry about whether my vocabulary is politically correct or not. (By the way the earliest references to "Computer Hackers" were in memos about MIT's timesharing system and phone system being screwed up by "so-called hackers" -- and it was definitely not a term of kindness. I see these discussions about "hacker" versus "cracker" or "technophile" or "cybercriminal" or whatever as a linguistic dodge to whitewash the unpleasant truth: there is a very large grey area between acceptable and unacceptable action and a lot of people are seeking a comfort-zone that justifies their doing things that annoy other people. No matter how you cut it, if it's damaging, annoying, or just plain rude, it's not proper behavior.) ~ mjr. (listen to his speech)
WHITE HAT
Welcome to Rixstep. Where business is the usual. Where the industry is watched because it needs watching. Where software products are watched for the same reason. Where you can actually unbelievably enough learn things. And where you'll find heaps of scrumptious software, some of it even for free. Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. The Rixstep domain was registered in May 2002 and went online in October of the same year. It is wholly owned and run by the Bloatbusters.
BLACK HAT
Dark Cloud Hovers Over Black Hat
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CISCO AND MICHAEL LYNN
Last week Black Hat, the Vegas security conference that was at the center of the Ciscogate controversy last summer, was purchased by CMP Media. The sale has the internet hens clucking about whether ownership by a larger, wealthier corporation will protect Black Hat from future legal challenges, or make it more susceptible to pressure from companies wanting to control vulnerability disclosures.
The more worrisome question is why Black Hat and other purveyors of security information must worry so much about what they disclose. For better or worse, the settlement I negotiated with Cisco in its case against researcher Michael Lynn kept some important legal issues from reaching a courtroom, and these unsettled questions cast a long shadow over security research today.
As a brief background, Michael, my client, worked for ISS, a company that provides security products and services. While there, Michael's job was to study Cisco products, to figure out how they worked and to analyze them for security flaws. Cisco did not give ISS or its employees Cisco source code and ISS had no nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, with Cisco. Michael had the typical NDA with ISS that he would not reveal confidential information obtained during the course of his employment there.
When Michael discovered the now-famous Cisco flaw, ISS initially was pleased to have Michael tout the success at Black Hat. Michael's presentation demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to execute remote code on Cisco routers, and encouraged systems administrators running vulnerable versions to upgrade fast.
But in the weeks leading up to the conference, Cisco and ISS butted heads over what information Michael would reveal about the router code. The day before the conference, Cisco and ISS cut a deal and informed Black Hat that it had to cut Michael's presentation out of the conference materials. Michael, concerned that important information was being suppressed, gave an edited version of his talk anyway, and by that afternoon, Cisco and ISS had jointly filed a federal lawsuit against Michael and Black Hat.
Among other claims, the lawsuit alleged that Michael and Black Hat misappropriated trade secrets by revealing Cisco code in his presentation.
In California, where Cisco is located and the lawsuit was filed, misappropriation means "acquisition by improper means, or disclosure without consent by a person who used improper means to acquire the knowledge." Improper means "includes theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, or espionage through electronic or other means." Importantly, "Reverse engineering or independent derivation alone shall not be considered improper means" under the law.
Michael didn't steal anything, and he never had access to confidential Cisco source code. He took the binary distributed with every Cisco router, decompiled it into machine code and used some pointers to the machine code to illustrate the claims made in his presentation.
Machine code is probably copyright-protected, but copyright's fair-use doctrine allows some copying for the purpose of critique and study.
California law makes it clear that people are allowed to study products on the market, and that a trade secret loses its special status when a company sells it to the public. When a company distributes confidential information to insiders, it can assure that that information remains protected by requiring the employee or contractor to sign an NDA.
Since Michael was not under an NDA with Cisco, he and Black Hat should have been in the clear. (At some point, Cisco and ISS lawyers claimed that Michael's NDA with ISS prevented him from reporting information he learned on the job about Cisco products, but arguing that Cisco flaws are ISS confidential information is a real stretch.)
But what about the Cisco End User License Agreement that ships with the router code? That's where things get interesting, and troubling for Black Hat's future.
Almost every piece of software today comes with a click-through EULA that purports to regulate how customers can use the product, including a limitation on reverse engineering. Companies have argued that the EULA has the exact same effect as an NDA - essentially letting every single customer in on a "secret" that they're legally obliged to protect.
If courts adopt this view, instead of keeping insiders loyal, trade-secret law can help companies force the public not to discuss published information.
And if EULAs do confer trade-secret protection, that might mean magazines, newspapers and conferences have a duty to screen information to make sure it wasn't obtained by prohibited reverse engineering.
In a variety of cases, courts have held that the press has a right to disseminate information of a public concern even if it was illegally obtained. In the Pentagon Papers case, The New York Times battled the Nixon White House over its right to publish a secret Department of Defense report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam that had been leaked by DOD employee Daniel Ellsberg. The Times won and the documents were published, calling the government version of the nation's decision to go to war into question.
In Barnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court said that a radio station could not be sued for playing a tape of an illegally intercepted telephone call between two union leaders involved in a matter of public interest, even though it knew that the person who recorded the call did so illegally, in violation of the Wiretap Act. Those are good decisions. But one of the only cases that addressed the issue of trade-secret publishers went the other way.
In a lawsuit filed by the DVD Copy Control Association against a California man who posted the DeCSS DVD-decryption code on his website, the California Supreme Court held that the First Amendment doesn't mean courts can't stop people from publishing trade secrets when the publisher knows or has reason to know that the information was acquired by improper means.
That case is different from the Pentagon Papers case and Barnicki because the court found that DeCSS wasn't a matter of public interest.
Of course, most security vulnerabilities are, especially those that affect the machines that form the backbone of the internet.
Today, it's unclear how a court would rule in a trade-secret case where Cisco sued ISS for violating the prohibition against reverse engineering.
The rule should be that EULAs don't make published information secret, under any circumstance. The contrary would be dangerous for Black Hat, Michael, future bug finders and computer security.
And while trade-secret law can prohibit accomplices and co-conspirators from publishing stolen data, reporters who merely know that information was improperly obtained should have a free-speech right to publish -- especially if the information reaches a matter of public interest, like the safety and security of the foundation of the internet.
Further information read about UCITA
Who does the security company work for?
You pay a company to keep bad stuff out of your machine. Do they get paid off not to? Do software companies have to fight skanky adware business in order to protect you?
ADWARE COMPANY QUIBBLES WITH LABEL
A company that makes and distributes adware has filed a lawsuit against a computer security company that identifies the adware company's products as "high risk." The adware purveyor, 180solutions, contends that Zone Labs erred in saying that some of 180solutions's applications try to monitor mouse movements and keystrokes. Although
some of its applications employ a technology that could be used in such a manner, those applications do not in fact work that way, according to 180solutions. Representatives from 180solutions said they tried to explain the situation to Zone Labs but were forced to file the lawsuit when Zone Labs refused to remove the applications in question from its list of high-risk tools. Eric Howes, a spyware researcher at the University of Illinois, said that despite its protestations, 180solutions remains "a perfectly legitimate target for anti-spyware companies." According to Howes, security professionals continue to "find unethical and illegal installations of 180's software." ZDNet, 1 December 2005
HACKER ETHICS
Anyone interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of wireless security and exploiting vulnerabilities will need a good set of base tools with which to work. Fortunately, there are an abundance of free tools available on the Internet. This list is not meant to be comprehensive in nature but rather to provide some general guidance on recommended tools to build your toolkit.
Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006 January 2, 2007
These 5 helped to disclosed serious vulnerabilities in the technologies we take for granted, forced software vendors to react faster to flaw warnings and pushed the vulnerability research boat into new, uncharted waters.
1) H.D. Moore has always been a household nameand a bit of a rock starin hacker circles. As a vulnerability researcher and exploit writer, he built the Metasploit Framework into a must-use penetration testing tool.
In 2006, Moore reloaded the open-source attack tool with new tricks to automate exploitation through scripting, simplify the process of writing an exploit, and increase the re-use of code between exploits. Moore's public research also included the MoBB (Month of Browser Bugs) project that exposed security flaws in the world's most widely used Web browsers; a malware search engine that used Google search queries to find live malware samples; the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) initiative that uncovered serious kernel-level flaws; and the discovery of Wi-Fi driver bugs that could cause code execution attacks. Moore's work nudged the security discussion to the mainstream media.
2) Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch and David Maynor
At the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch teamed up with former SecureWorks researcher David Maynor to warn of exploitable flaws in wireless device drivers. The presentation triggered an outburst from the Mac faithful and an ugly disclosure spat that still hasn't been fully resolved. For Ellch and Maynor, the controversy offered a double-edged sword. In many ways, they were hung out to dry by Apple and SecureWorks, two
companies that could not manage the disclosure process in a professional manner. In some corners of the blogosphere, they were unfairly maligned for mentioning that the Mac was vulnerable.However, security researchers who understood the technical natureand severity of their findings, Ellch and Maynor were widely celebrated for their work, which was the trigger for the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) project that launched with exploits for Wi-Fi driver vulnerabilities. Since the Black Hat talk, a slew of vendorsincluding Broadcom, D-Link, Toshiba and Applehave shipped fixes for the same class of bugs identified by Ellch and Maynor, confirming the validity of their findings.Maynor has since moved on, leaving SecureWorks to launch Errata Security, a product testing and security consulting startup.
3) Mark Russinovich Before Mark Russinovich's mind-blowing expose of Sony BMG's use of stealth technology in a DRM (digital rights management) scheme, "rootkit" was a techie word. Now, the word is being used in marketing material for every anti-virus vendor, cementing Russinovich's status as a Windows internals guru with few equals. The Sony rootkit discovery highlighted the fact that anti-virus vendors were largely clueless about the threat from stealth malware and forced security vendors to build anti-rootkit scanners into existing products. Russinovich, who now works at Microsoft after Redmond acquired
Sysinternals, spent most of 2006 expanding on his earlier rootkit warnings and building new malware hunting tools and utilities.
4) Joanna Rutkowska In a standing-room-only presentation, she dismantled the new driver-signing mechanism in Windows Vista to plant a rootkit on the operating system and also introduced the world to "Blue Pill," a virtual machine rootkit that remains "100 percent undetectable," even on Windows Vista x64 systems.
