Hacking Community
From Mod Mania
Hackers: World Wide Modification of Anything
In this modern age hackers are no longer considered basement dwelling nerds with no natural light shining on them in years, this is the perception that was thought of them in the 80’s and early 90’s. This community is now one of the Interwebs most respected and feared communities. The Hacking community is like this for the reason that it is not something that everyone can do or wants to do due to its legal complications. Hacking, for me, is the graffiti community of the internet; because though there are legal complications for doing it ranging from a slap on the wrist to imprisonment, some people make the choice to do it for good and others for evil, much like in graffiti where some do it for artistic reasons and others do it just to deface property.
Hacking is an extremely secretive community, unlike most other communities it requires a high level of secrecy among its members and even higher level of intelligence not everyone can one day say “hmmm…I feel like becoming a hacker!” it takes years of dedication and a high understanding of computers and electronics to begin with, without this no matter how much dedication you put in you could never be the best in the community much like with graffiti, it requires a mindset. This is what makes the hacking such a unique community because it is not only hard to join the community its even harder to find.
The legal complications can range from low to extremely severe depending on who or what you are hacking into. The community works on a formula of “the greater the risk, the greater the reward”, this is because if someone were to hack into the DoD (Department of Defense) database; which has happened only twice in the past, can get you in huge legal trouble, or on the other hand can land you a fantastically paid job as a white hat hacker. In the hacking community there are three types of hackers, Black Hats, White hats and Grey Hats.
Now your Black Hats are your classic bad guys, much like the dark side of the force, they are the strongest of all hackers with a lot of people behind them and a fantastic knowledge of coding and the various operations the code can perform. White Hats are often the walkovers or sellouts of the hacking community though still strong, these are the good guys of hacking who are often employed by companies like Symantec to stop black hats from either getting into there system or cracking their software. Then there are Grey Hats you classic double crosser, these are black hats that have gone to major companies like IBM, apple and Microsoft and on the rare occasion employed by government and have given them major advice on virii in development or just before they are released.
Now community events are actually quite common for hackers, one of the foremost leaders in hacking conventions and meetings is a meeting called DEF CON , this even is a place where hackers, federal and international investigation agencies attend for fun, conferences, investigationing and socializing. Various other events are held through out the year but DEF CON is the biggest and oldest of all the meetings. This is a public hacking event as compared to the secret events which are held internationally such as \\:KCAH , this is one of the most secretive events in the hacking community, peoplewho want to attend \\:KCAH are only informed via a secure IRC channel chat 12 hours before the event is held, this is so may of the worlds best coders, hackers and script kiddies can share there latest and greatest virii, worms and Trojans with the elite of the hacking community.
In the past the hacking community has been represented grossly inaccurately in the media, from movies and games to television, some of the biggest misrepresentations are that every hacker is evil, money hungry and is trying to break into some FBI super computer. Also they are always represented as being mid 40’s people who live in their basement with an awesome computer but the truth is that most great hackers start when they are 14-15 and stop when they are about 30-35 because after that the risk becomes to great and technology surpasses what they can do, not only that but most hacking and compiling of code an worms can be done on obsoleted computers which makes it harder for agencies to track due to outdated technology, this is common for most hackers to do. Swordfish though great for its entertainment value is very, extremely, cataclysmically clichéd the only really accurate part of the movie is the title “Swordfish” based on a Marx brothers movie Horse Feathers, which is a well known password joke among the online communities.
Now the hacking community is also known for its very destructive capabilities, one of the most famous and destructive computer worms is known as the “Blaster-B Worm” it is believed that since its creation and release that it has been edited and re-released in many different forms spanning into the 100,000 range weather it be one line of code or half of the code it is one of the most successful computer worms as it was thought to have infected half of the worlds computers IBM’s Blue Gene/L and Roadrunner, now though the original was tracked to an American youth, the other variants are still around the web in some pocket waiting to be released by vigilante hacking groups. People in the hacking community still revel at this worms success because of how many computer were infected with no warnings about it until about 2 months after it’s release, that is a huge amount of time for a worm or virus.
Though the hacking community has done many things to cause trouble often this disruption is mostly harmless and only affects things like the look of a website or it’s operation speed. But there is something that involves whole communities of hackers and non-hackers alike and this is known as a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) or Low Orbit Ion Cannon for those in the various chan communities. This allows groups of hackers to take down sites such as PayPal, MasterCard and even Visa. These sort of attacks are usually organized by people within sub communities of hacking, this biggest of these sub-communities being Anonymous, a community of people with strong ideals about freedom, justice and meme freedom. now this group has not been around for decades but is quite powerful for it’s age. The group allows hackers to converse in a manner that allows them to coordinate attacks on sites and even on physical entities like the church of scientology, through cryptic and psychological means and is also a good channel to play tricks on the general public and scare them.
So hacking, It’s the graffiti of the internet, it can be used for good or evil and even for a bit of both, but one thing is for sure, Hugh Jackman is way too ruggedly handsome to be a real hacker and also, “We Are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget. Expect Us.”
Just please for the love of god…don’t mess around on the Interwebs.
Dark Tangent [Last Updated 1/4/2011]. ‘About Us’ DEF CON [Online] https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-about.html (2011), (Accessed 4 April, 2011)
