[261] in Best-of-Security
BoS: "Underground" - very cool book on hacking/computer crime.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Darren Reed)
Mon Jun 23 11:46:39 1997
From: Darren Reed <darrenr@cyber.com.au>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 22:51:45 +1000 (EST)
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A few people will have heard me mention this book already, but I think
there are bits and pieces of this book which will surprise quite a few
people. Most of us are used to reading stories about hacking by the
people who did the catching of the hackers...this one is an ongoing
story of the local hacker scene...with not so local contacts and exploits.
Some of the important things to note are just how well they do work
together, as well as competing with each other and what they do when
they get pissed off with each other. Meanwhile most of the white hats
are too busy trying to hoard information from the other white hats...
Having been on the "victim" side in the past, it is quite frustrating
when someone you've worked to have arrested gets off with a fine. Most
of us would agree that they should be locked up somewhere, but
according to what's in the book, most of them are suffering from either
problems at home or other mental disorders (including one claim in court
to being addicted to hacking). Anyone for a "Hackers Anonymous Association"
for help in drying out from this nefarious activity ? At least in one
case documented within the perpetrators get sentenced to time behind bars.
It's somewhat comforting to read that people have actually broken into
the machines which belong to security experts such as Gene Spafford and
Matt Bishop, although I'd have preferred to have not read how they
successfully broke into the NIC :-/ Don't know about you, but I don't
care what motives they have, I'd prefer for them to not be getting inside
machines which provide integral services for the Internet.
For all of you who like to hide behind firewalls, in one instance a hacker
comes in through X.25 and out onto the Internet. Nice and easy 'cause
we don't need to firewall our X.25 connection do we ? :-)
Oh, and just for all those VMS weenies who like to say "We're secure,
we run VMS not Unix" - the first chapter of the book is on a VMS worm
called "WANK" that came close to taking the NASA VMS network completely
off air. I wonder how long it will take for an NT equivalent to surface...
All in all, a pretty good read (one from which I'm sure hackers will learn
just as much from as the rest of us).
The book's details are:
Title: UNDERGROUND - Tales of Hacking, madness and obsession on the
Electronic Frontier
ISBN 1-86330-595-5
Author: Suelette Dreyfus
Publisher: Random House
Publisher's address: 20 Alfred St, Milsons Point, NSW 2061, Australia
Price: AUS$19.95
before I forget, the best URL for the book I've found is:
http://www.underground-book.com (http://underground.org/book is a mirror)
Darren
