Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

PUP #9 ~ HACKERS part one - who are those guys?

They have a bad rep don't they? From nerdy kids who hack high profile websites to criminal masterminds who write code all day in order to steal millions of dollars of our money, the personal data of millions of users, the money and assets of big corporations or even take part in shutting a whole country down.

If hackers were reading this they'd probably object to being portrayed as pantomime villains because there is no common type of hacker. Some are even offended by the word, preferring the term 'email spammers' as that is the method they often use to steal stuff.

People hack for many different reasons: because they're bored, unloved or insecure and want attention, because they're angry, because they are under peer pressure, or are self-righteous, hate authority, or just for the 'lulz'... in fact, any human emotion can turn someone into a hacker. But the main reason is probably because they can! It can be addictive and a lot of money can be made.

When the internet started, the various mindsets of early hackers may have been shaped by the 'hackers' charter' written by international cyber criminal Mentor shortly after his arrest. I won't feature the whole thing here but this is a flavour of his beliefs.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.       

Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. 

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.

It's pointless me trying to praise, justify or condemn a hacker, or even judge what is right or wrong about them. They choose their path for many reasons. The world wants to demonise them though and, continuing the pantomime theme, they adopt these clichéd labels.

Black Hat hacker

The black hat will work for himself (they are mainly male), or for a website, a company, a country or a security service that wants to do bad stuff. Of course in reality this could be any company or agency, and 'bad stuff'' can be good stuff to some people, especially his employers. He will do all this without getting anyone's permission, obviously. His 'blackness' has different degrees, depending how low he will stoop for money. He could work for an ad company, keen to infiltrate a popular website and spam all its members with a fake prize message; or perhaps use a programme that encrypts a top CEO's crucial files or pictures and demand a ransom to unlock them. He might hack for criminal gangs who want to get data from a national website for blackmail or to bring it down in an extortion scam, or to pass on to paedophile rings or onto other hacker networks for money; he might aid security services who want to break into a foreign power's government secrets, or want to hack someone's car so it crashes, or want to stop someone's pacemaker so they die, or hack the phone of world leader. That sort of stuff.

It's quite common for the security services to hire hackers and sometimes even black hats. The FBI paid hackers to break into an iPhone without asking Apple first. In 2014 Apple produced the iPhone 5C (running their OS 9), which uses a four-digit login code. If the users activated the security options it protected their data, and if forced or hacked, automatically deleted it. This was hailed as a great boon for user security and privacy because not even Apple could get into it and that annoyed the hell out of the FBI because the user might be a criminal.