SONUSOFT - Hacking Tips 2

Building boundaries between hackers and crackers

The Mentor’s critique of the media’s portrayal of hackers is an attempt to build a boundary between ethical hackers (a.k.a. "white hats") and unethical crackers (a.k.a. "black hats"). According to hacker Candy Man whereas hackers use their intelligence (Ex. extensive knowledge of Unix) to break into systems but will avoid harming data, crackers are dumb and get passwords using well-known techniques and do so with the intent of damaging the system. As another example of similar boundary drawing, Hafner and Markoff in Cyberpunk refer to Kevin Mitnick as a "dark-side" hacker due to his malicious activities such as tapping phone lines, personal threats and manipulation, breaking into telecom buildings, etc. Kevin Mitnick was eventually imprisoned for stealing 20,000 credit card numbers. Hackers are generally very supportive of this boundary. Phrack often interviewed famous phreaks or hackers, and about half of them would sharply criticize the new generation for their unethical and uneducated behavior. The criticism of crackers is fueled by the belief that they give hacking a bad name, but also they draw the attention of law enforcement and increase the chances of everyone getting caught.

What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.