Secret of Hacker

I don't know how to begin this article since I am not good at writing. Whatever let begin with the following prolog.

Hacking in the Village

"Where am I?"

"In the Village."

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"Whose side are you on?"

"That would be telling. We want... information... information... information."

"Well you won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will!"

Remember the '60s TV show The Prisoner? Created by and starring Patrick

McGoohan, this surrealist series was basically a platform for McGoohan to explore his

own fears of modem surve-illance/spy technology, behavioral engineering, and

society's increasing ability to control people through pacifying pleasures.

He was convinced that all this might soon mean the obliteration of the individual

(expressed in the defiant opening shout: "I am not a number, I am a free man!").

McGoohan's #6 character became a symbol of the lone individual's right to remain

an individual rather than a numbered cog in the chugging machinery of the State.

McGoohan, a Luddite to be sure, despised even the TV technology that brought his

libertarian tale to the masses. He saw no escape from the mushrooming technoarmed

State short of out-and-out violent revolution (it was, after all, the '60s!). As

prescient as The Prisoner series proved to be in some regards, McGoohan failed to

see how individuals armed with the same tech as their warders could fight back. The

#6 character himself comes close to revealing this in a number of episodes, as he

uses his will, his ingenuity, and his own spy skills to reroute #2's attempts to rob

him of his individuality.

One doesn't have to stretch too far to see the connection between The Prisoner and

the subject at hand: hacking. With all the social engineering, spy skills, and street

tech knowledge that #6 possessed, he lacked one important thing: access to the

higher tech that enslaved him and the other hapless village residents. Today's

techno-warriors are much better equipped to hack the powers that be for whatever

personal, social or political gains.

In the last two-part episode of the series, #6 finally reveals why he quit his

intelligence job: "Too

many people know too much." Again, this expresses McGoohan's fear that the

powers that be were holding the goods on him and everyone else who was bucking

the status quo at that time. He probably didn't mean "people" as much as he meant

"governments." It is this fact, that "too many [governments/megacorps/special

interest groups] know too much" that has provided an important motivation to many

contemporary hackers and has fueled the rampant techno-romantic myths of the

hacker as a freedom of information warrior.

Let's look at a number of the mythic images of the hacker that have arisen in the

past decade and explore the reality that they both reflect and distort:

The Hacker as Independent Scientist

The first image of hackerdom to emerge in the '60s and 70s was of the benevolent

computer science student pushing the limits of computer technology and his/her own

intellect. Computer labs at MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and many other schools

hummed through the night as budding brainiacs sat mesmerized by the promise of

life on the other side of a glowing computer screen. These early hackers quickly

developed a set of ethics that centered around the pursuit of pure knowledge and the

idea that hackers should share all of their information and brilliant hacks with each

other. Steven Levy summarizes this ethic in his 1984 book Hackers: "To a hacker a

closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. Just as information should

be clearly and elegantly transported within the computer, and just as software

should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to

files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way

the world works. When a hacker needed something to help him create, explore, or

fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights."

While this ethic continues to inform many hackers, including the author of the book

you are holding, it has become more difficult for many to purely embrace, as the

once innocent and largely sheltered world of hackerdom has opened up onto a vast

geography of data continents with spoils beyond measure, tempting even the most

principled hackers. The Knightmare weaves his way in and out of these ethical

issues throughout Secrets of a Super Hacker.

The Hacker as Cowboy

The cowboy has always served as a potent American myth of individuality and

survivalism in the face of a harsh and lawless frontier. It is no accident that William

Gibson chose cowboy metaphors for his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel

Neuromancer (1984). Case and the other "console cowboys" in the novel ride a

cybernetic range as data rustlers for hire, ultimately sad and alone in their harsh

nomadic world. They are both loner heroes and bad assed predators of the law

abiding cyber citizenry they burn in their wake.

I don't think I need to tell readers here what impact Gibson's fictional world has had

on fueling hacker fan-tasies or what potent similarities exist between Gibson's world

and our own.

Like the cowboy tales of the wild west, the myth of the hacker as cowboy is

undoubtedly more image over substance (as are most of the myths we will explore

here), but there are some important kernels of truth: a) hackers are often loners, b)

there are many nomadic and mercenary aspects to the burgeoning cyberspace of the

1990s, and c) it is a wide open and lawless territory where the distinctions between

good and bad, following the law and forging a new one, and issues of free access and

property rights are all up for grabs (remember the Indians?). Not surprisingly,

Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow (a Wyoming cattle

rancher himself) chose frontier metaphors when he wrote his landmark essay "Crime

and Puzzlement" (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990). The first section of this lengthy

essay, that lead to the birth of the EFF was entitled, "Desperadoes of the

DataSphere."

The Hacker as Techno-Terrorist

When I was a budding revolutionary in the 70s, with my Abbie Hoffman and Jimi

Hendrix

posters and my cache of middle class weapons (.22 caliber rifles, .12 gauge shotgun,

hunting bows), 1, like McGoohan, was gearing up for the Big Confrontation. With a

few friends (who seemed more interested in firearms than revolutionary rhetoric), I

used to do maneuvers in the woods near my house. We would fantasize how it was

all gonna come down and what role we (the "Radicals for Social Improvement")

would play in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't take a military genius to see

the futility of armed force against the U.S. military on its own turf. The idea that

bands of weekend rebels, however well trained and coordinated, could bring down

"The Man" was pure romance. Part of me knew this the same part of me that was

more interested in posture than real revolution and in getting laid more than in

fucking up the State. My friends and I were content to play act, to dream the

impossible dream of overthrow.

One of the first "aha's" I had about computer terrorism in the late '80s was that the

possibilities for insurrection and for a parity of power not based on brute force had

changed radically with the advent of computer networks and our society's almost

complete reliance on them. There was now at least the possibility that groups or

individual hackers could seriously compromise the U.S. military and/or civilian

electronic infrastructure. The reality of this hit home on November 2, 1988, when

Robert Morris, Jr., the son of a well known computer security researcher, brought

down over 10% of the Internet with his worm

(a program that self propagates over a network, reproducing as it goes). This event

led to a media feeding frenzy which brought the heretofore computer underground

into the harsh lights of television cameras and sound bite journalism. "Hacker

terrorists," "viruses," "worms," "computer espionage"...all of a sudden, everyone was

looking over their shoulders for lurking cyberspooks and sniffing their computer disks

and downloads to see if they had con-tracted nasty viruses. A new computer

security industry popped up overnight, offering counseling, virus protection software

(sometimes with antidotes to viruses that didn't even exist!), and work shops,

seminars and books on computer crime.

Hysteria over hacker terrorism reached another plateau in 1990 with the execution

of Operation Sundevil, a wide net Secret Service operation in tended to cripple the

now notorious hacker underground. Like a cat chasing its own tail, the busts and

media coverage and additional busts, followed by more sensational reportage,

created a runaway loop of accelerating hysteria and misinformation. One radio

report on the "stealing" (copying, actually) of a piece of information "critical to the

operations of the Emergency 911 system" for Bell South opined: "It's a miracle that

no one was seriously hurt." Of course, the truth turned out to be far less dramatic.

The copied booty was a very boring text document on some management aspects of

the Bell South system. For a thorough and lively account of this and many of the

other arrests made during Operation Sundevil, check out Bruce Sterling's The Hacker

Crackdown (Bantam, 1992).

Whatever the truth of these particular incidents, computer crime is here big time and

the boasts of even the most suspect hacker/cracker are usually at least theoretically

possible. Computer terrorism has yet to rear its head in any significant fashion, but

the potential is definitely there. This is very unsettling when you think how many

people can gain access to critical systems and how many loony tunes there are out

there armed with computers, modems, and less than honorable intentions.

Wireheads of every gauge would do well to study volumes like Secrets of a Super

Hacker to stay abreast of the game and to cover their backsides should the

proverbial shit hit the fan.

The Hacker as Pirate

Next to "cowboy," the most Potent and popular image of the hacker is that of a

pirate. Oceanographic and piracy metaphors are equally as common in cyberculture

as ones about lawless frontiers and modem-totin' cowboys and cowgirls. People talk

of "surfing the edge," and the "vast oceans of the Internet." Bruce Sterling's near

future novel about data piracy was named Islands in the Net. In it, third world

countries and anarchist enclaves operate data havens, buying and selling global

information through the world's wide

bandwidth computer networks.

Anarchist theorist and rantmeister Hakim Bey penned an essay called "Temporary

Autonomous Zones

(or T.A.Z.)" inspired by Sterling's data islands. Bey sees in the rapidly growing

technoiv

sphere of our planet the possibilities for a new form of nomadic anarchic culture that

might resemble the sea-faring pirate societies of the 18th century. Using all the

resources of the global nets, individ-ual cybernauts can come together to form

tempo-rary and virtual enclaves. These bands can wreak havoc, throw a party,

exchange intelligence, or whatever else they want. Once the deed is done, the party

over, the nomadic bands simply disappear back into the dense fabric of cyberspace.

While de-cidedly romantic, the TAZ idea is attractive to many hackers and

cyberspace residents who daily feel the fluidity of movement and the potential for

invisibility offered on "the nets."

Of course, let's not kid ourselves, pirates were mainly concerned with stealing things.

In cyber-space, piracy becomes a more ambiguous and con-tested can of worms.

Are you really taking some-thing if you're simply looking at it or making a copy of it?

If you copy copyrighted material - let's say an image - and then alter it significantly,

to the point that it is almost unrecognizable, have you violated the copyright? What

if you're using it as raw materials in a piece of art, like collage? What does stealing

mean when what is stolen is nothing more than a particular assemblage of electrical

im-pulses? I regularly download recognizable audio bytes from networks, process

them in a sound edi-tor, and then use them in various audio art projects. Am I

stealing? If I publish the work commercially, THEN is it plagiarism? All of these

questions about sampling, copying, cutting, pasting, re-purposing, and altering have

become the thorny legal and ethical issues of our cybernetic age. Hackerdom is one

of the domains that is rapidly fueling the fire.

The Hacker as Biblical David

When liberal and fringe media want to feel good about hacking and cracking they

start invok-ing images of the hacker as a do-gooder David against a

military/industrial Goliath. This myth of the hacker, based on the "parity of power"

theme discussed above can bring comfort to those of us who are paranoid about

megacorporate and gov-ernment big brothers. However over-romanticized this myth

is, there is comfort to be found in the knowledge that individuals can penetrate even

the most behemoth systems. If big brother gets too big for his britches, "Davidian"

(?) hackers are standing by to do some necessary tailoring.

The Hacker as Security Informant

Another do-gooder myth revolves around the hacker as an either self-appointed or

hired security checker. Many hackers, true to their ethos of simply wanting to push

the limits of their ability and not to cause harm, will report holes in security after

they've breached them. To the hacker who is inter-ested in the gamesmanship and

challenge of pene-trating a system, tipping off the system's adminis-trators means a

new level of challenge should they ever return. Hackers who are hired for purposes

of testing system security, called "tiger teams," also work to compromise the

security of a system to find weaknesses. Often times, these hired guns are

convicted computer criminals who "go straight." Several members of the legendary

Legion of Doom, caught in the Operation Sundevil busts, formed COMSEC, a

computer security team for hire. While many hackers bristle at such turncoat

maneuvers, other more politically neutral hackers point out that it doesn't really

matter to them who they're working for as long as they get to hack.

The Hacker as U.S. Cavalry

just as Hollywood movies raised the lowly dirt-lickin' cowboy to mythic status, it is

now pre-senting hackers as a tech-mounted U.S. Cavalry, a cyberpunk version of

Mighty Mouse, here to save the day - and save the movie - in the final seconds.

Movies such as WarGames, Sneakers, Jurassic Park, and TV shows such as Max

Headroom glamorize hackers, often portraying them as misguided geniuses who

finally see the light and prevent calamities they're often responsible for in-itiating.

At the same time that the mainstream me-dia has demonized hackers, Hollywood

has ro-manticized them. John Badham's 1983 film WarGames probably did more to

stimulate interest in hacking and phone phreaking among young people than

anything before or since. Numerous

v

legendary hackers have credited that film as their chief inspiration and raison d'etre.

All these films have also played into the myth of the evil govern-ment and

megacorps who deserve the harassment that the hacker protagonists dish out. As

this intro-duction is being written, rumors are flying fast and furious that a number

of near-future hacker/cyberpunk TV shows are in the works. It will be very

interesting to see how Hollywood con-tinues to re-invent the hacker.

The Hacker as cyborg

Ultimately computer hacking and net navigat-ing, and the images and fantasies

surrounding them, represent something greater than the sum of the parts outlined

here. It is this writer's opinion that hackers represent the scouts to a new territory

that is just now beginning to be mapped out by others. Hackers were the first

cybernauts, the first group of people to understand that we as a species are about to

disappear into a cyberspace at least similar in function to that posited by William

Gib-son in his 80's fiction. As Manuel De Landa explains in his book War in the Age

of Intelligent Machines (MIT, 1991), we are forging a new symbiotic relationship with

machines via computers. The na-ture of this relationship and the level of individual

freedom afforded by it has a lot to do with how hackers, visionary scientists, and the

first wave of cyber-settlers go about their business. While De Landa is very

laudatory toward the "freedom of in-formation" ethic and developmental ingenuity of

hackerdom, he cautions those who wish to make too much trouble for individuals

and organiza-tions, leading to retaliation, escalation of tensions, and increased

paranoia. He writes: "...[S]orne elements of the hacker ethic which were once

indispensable means to channel their energies into the quest for interactivity

(system-crashing, physical and logical lock-busting) have changed character as the

once innocent world of hackerism has become the mul-timillion-dollar business of

computer crime. What used to be a healthy expression of the hacker maxim that

information should flow freely is now in danger of becoming a new form of terrorism

and organized crime which could create a new era of unprecedented repression. "De

Landa. argues elsewhere in Machines that the U.S. government's, especially the

military's, desire to centralize decision-making power has been seri-ously

compromised by the personal computer revolution. He speculates that those outside

the military-industrial machinery have only a few years to develop a new and truly

decentralized sys-tem of networks before the military devises a new tactical doctrine

that subsumes the distributed PC.

The images of hacking: coming in under the wire of mainstream society, cobbling

together tech-nology for individual and group purposes, over-coming limitations, and

all the other real and imagined dimensions of hacking, have become part of a new

academic trend that uses the sci-fi image of the cyborg as a model of late twentieth

century humanity. These academics have embraced cyber-punk sci-fi, the politicized

image of the hacker, and postmodern ideas about posthumanism (a future of

human/machine hybridization). Anyone who spends most of their waking hours

patched into a PC and the Internet or in hacking code has felt the margins between

themselves and their machines getting very leaky. Hackers were the first to experience

this " many others are now following in their digital footsteps. Hacking has

become trendy and chic among people who, if pressed, couldn't even define an

operating system. The "idea" of hacking has migrated far from the actual act of

hacking. It has become a cultural icon about decentralized power for the turn of the

millennium.

The Knightmare's Vision

Behind all these lofty notions lies the tedious and compelling act of the hack itself.

Hacker-monikered "The Knightmare" presents his complex view of hacking in Secrets

of a Super Hacker. In this classic hacker cookbook, the author has gone to great

pains to explain the massive width and breadth of hacking, cracking, and com-puter

security. With Sherlock Holmes-like compul-sion and attention to detail, he presents

the history of hacking, the how-tos of hacking, the legal and ethical issues

surrounding hacking, and his own personal reasons for hacking. Numerous

examples and "amazing hacker tales" take the reader inside

each level of the hack. Reading Secrets will change the way you look at computers

and computer se-curity. It has already been very valuable to me. I am a smarter

computer/net user now and. much more attuned to computer security.

When Patrick McGoohan conceived of The Prisoner he wanted to create a show that

would de-mand thinking. He wanted controversy, argu-ments, fights, discussions,

people waving fists in his face. You might love the show, you might hate the show

(or both), but you would HAVE to talk about it. Computer hacking and the wooly

frontiers of cyberspace are similar domains of controversy. In the true spirit of

freedom of information, Secrets of a Super Hacker is being made available to anyone

who cares to read it. It is my hope that it will help keep the debate alive and that

those who make use of its privileged information will do so responsibly and without

malice.

Be Seeing You,