1.
Security hacker
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A security hacker is someone who seeks to breach defenses and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground, there is a longstanding controversy about the terms true meaning. The black-hat meaning still prevails among the general public, in computer security, a hacker is someone who focuses on security mechanisms of computer and network systems. While including those who endeavor to strengthen such mechanisms, it is often used by the mass media. That is, the media portrays the hacker as a villain, nevertheless, parts of the subculture see their aim in correcting security problems and use the word in a positive sense. White hat is the given to ethical computer hackers, who utilize hacking in a helpful way. White hats are becoming a part of the information security field. Accordingly, the term bears strong connotations that are favorable or pejorative, the subculture around such hackers is termed network hacker subculture, hacker scene or computer underground. It initially developed in the context of phreaking during the 1960s and it is implicated with 2600, The Hacker Quarterly and the alt.2600 newsgroup. In 1980, an article in the August issue of Psychology Today used the term hacker in its title and it was an excerpt from a Stanford Bulletin Board discussion on the addictive nature of computer use. In the 1982 film Tron, Kevin Flynn describes his intentions to break into ENCOMs computer system, CLU is the software he uses for this. By 1983, hacking in the sense of breaking computer security had already been in use as computer jargon, but there was no public awareness about such activities. However, the release of the film WarGames that year, featuring a computer intrusion into NORAD, the Newsweek article appears to be the first use of the word hacker by the mainstream media in the pejorative sense. Pressured by media coverage, congressman Dan Glickman called for an investigation, as a result of these laws against computer criminality, white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers try to distinguish themselves from each other, depending on the legality of their activities. These moral conflicts are expressed in The Mentors The Hacker Manifesto, use of the term hacker meaning computer criminal was also advanced by the title Stalking the Wily Hacker, an article by Clifford Stoll in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM. Later that year, the release by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. of the so-called Morris worm provoked the popular media to spread this usage, the popularity of Stolls book The Cuckoos Egg, published one year later, further entrenched the term in the publics consciousness. Several subgroups of the underground with different attitudes use different terms to demarcate themselves from each other. Eric S. Raymond, author of The New Hackers Dictionary, yet, those people see themselves as hackers and even try to include the views of Raymond in what they see as a wider hacker culture, a view that Raymond has harshly rejected
2.
Phreaking
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The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for, the term first referred to groups who had reverse engineered the system of tones used to route long-distance calls. By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset, to ease the creation of these tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community, including future Apple Inc. cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The blue box era came to an end with the use of computerized phone systems. By the 1980s, much of the system in the US, Phreaking has since become closely linked with computer hacking. This is sometimes called the H/P culture, Phone phreaking got its start in the late 1950s in the United States. Its golden age was the late 1960s and early 1970s, prior to 1984, long-distance telephone calls were a premium item, with archaic regulations. In some locations, calling across the street counted as long distance, Phreaking consisted of techniques to evade the long-distance charges. This evasion was illegal, the crime was called toll fraud and it is done by rapidly pressing and releasing the switch hook to open and close the subscriber circuit, simulating the pulses generated by the rotary dial. Even most current telephone exchanges support this method, as they need to be compatible with old subscriber hardware. The pulse counter in the exchange counts the pulses or clicks, depending on continent and country, one click with a following interval can be either one or zero and subsequent clicks before the interval are additively counted. This renders ten consecutive clicks being either zero or nine, respectively, some exchanges allow using additional clicks for special controls, but numbers 0-9 now fall in one of these two standards. One special code, flash, is a short single click, possible. Such key-locked telephones, if wired to a modern DTMF capable exchange and these signals are now very uniformly standardized worldwide, and along with rotary dialing, they are almost all that is left of in-band signaling. Because the UK network as run by the Post Office was reliant on Strowger switches, the exchanges worked on pulses received from each subscribers phone, so tone signaling was of no use. The techniques primarily relied on the quirks of the exchange wiring, some typical tricks used between the 1950s and 1970s included, 9-1-11. By dialing an exchange local to the phone, dialing 9-1-10 then at the right moment tapping the phone rest to add an extra pulse. Sometimes it was possible to find a local exchange which when the caller dialed the local code, then added 0
3.
Cryptovirology
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Cryptovirology is a field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software. The field was born with the observation that public-key cryptography can be used to break the symmetry between what an antivirus analyst sees regarding malware and what the attacker sees. The public key allows the malware to perform trapdoor one-way operations on the computer that only the attacker can undo. The first cryptovirology attack, invented by Adam L. Young and Moti Yung, is called cryptoviral extortion, in this attack a cryptovirus, cryptoworm, or cryptotrojan contains the public key of the attacker and hybrid encrypts the victims files. The malware prompts the user to send the asymmetric ciphertext to the attacker who will decipher it, the victim needs the symmetric key to get the files back if there are no backups of them. The 1996 IEEE paper of Young and Yung predicted that cryptoviral extortion attackers would one day demand e-money, many years later the media relabeled cryptoviral extortion as ransomware. In 2016 cryptovirology attacks on healthcare providers reached epidemic levels prompting the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services to issue a Fact Sheet on Ransomware, the rationale being that an adversary has taken control of the information. This expansion of the breach to account for cryptoviral extortion is monumental since now a breach can happen even when sensitive data never leaves the victim organization. California enacted a law that defines the introduction of ransomware into a system with the intent of extortion as being against the law. This is SB-1137 that amends Section 523 of the Penal Code, the field also encompasses covert malware attacks in which the attacker securely steals private information such as symmetric keys, private keys, PRNG state, and the victims data. Examples of such attacks are asymmetric backdoors. An asymmetric backdoor is a backdoor that can be used only by the attacker and this contrasts with the traditional backdoor that is symmetric, i. e. anyone that finds it can use it. The NIST Dual EC DRBG random bit generator has a backdoor in it. The EC-DRBG algorithm utilizes the discrete-log kleptogram from Kleptography which by definition makes the EC-DRBG a cryptotrojan, like ransomware, the EC-DRBG cryptotrojan contains and uses the attackers public key to attack the host system. Due to public outcry of this attack, NIST rescinded the EC-DRBG algorithm from the NIST SP 800-90 standard. Covert information leakage attacks carried out by cryptoviruses, cryptotrojans, and cryptoworms that, by definition, contain, in deniable password snatching by Young and Yung IEEE S&P1997, a cryptovirus installs a cryptotrojan that asymmetrically encrypts host data and covertly broadcasts it. This makes it available to everyone, noticeable by no one, an attacker caught installing the cryptotrojan claims to be a virus victim. An attacker observed receiving the covert asymmetric broadcast is one of if not millions of receivers
4.
Hacker culture
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The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness, however, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but the manner in which it is done and whether it is something exciting and meaningful. Therefore, the hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology s Tech Model Railroad Club, Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program, What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could and they also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in an exciting way than anyone believed possible. I bet you didnt believe this could be done, as documented in the Jargon File, these hackers are disappointed by the mass media and general publics usage of the word hacker to refer to security breakers, calling them crackers instead. The word hacker derives from the word of a lusty laborer who harvested fields by dogged. Although the idea of hacking has existed long before the term hacker—with the most notable example of Lightning Ellsworth, in fact, many of the first programmers were from engineering or physics backgrounds. With this definition in mind, it can be clear where the negative implications of the word hacker, some common nicknames among this culture include crackers who are unskilled thieves who mainly rely on luck. Others include phreak—which refers to a type of skilled crackers and warez d00dz—which is a kind of cracker that acquires reproductions of copyrighted software, within all hackers are tiers of hackers such as the samurai who are hackers that hire themselves out for legal electronic locksmith work. Furthermore, there are other hackers who are hired to test security, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University were particularly well-known hotbeds of early hacker culture. Over time, the hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious, more cohesive. The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly driven by the commoditization of computer and networking technology. Many of the values and tenets of the free and open software movement stem from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race and you can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better, Hacker ethics are concerned primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and engaging in the hands-on imperative. Hack value is the used by hackers to express that something is worth doing or is interesting. This is something that often feel intuitively about a problem or solution
5.
Hacker Manifesto
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The Conscience of a Hacker is a small essay written January 8,1986 by a computer security hacker who went by the handle of The Mentor, who belonged to the 2nd generation of Legion of Doom. It was written after the authors arrest, and first published in the underground hacker ezine Phrack and can be found on websites, as well as on T-shirts. Considered a cornerstone of hacker culture, The Manifesto acts as a guideline to hackers across the globe, when asked about his motivation for writing the article, Blankenship said, I was going through hacking withdrawal, and Craig/Knight Lightning needed something for an upcoming issue of Phrack. I was reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and was taken with the idea of revolution. At a more prominent public event, when asked about his arrest and motivation for writing the article, Blankenship said, and a great deal of empathy for my friends around the nation that were also in the same situation. The article is quoted several times in the 1995 movie Hackers, although in the movie it is being read from an issue of the hacker magazine 2600, the Mentor gave a reading of The Hacker Manifesto and offered additional insight at H2K2. It is also an item in the game Culpa Innata, the Hackers Way written by Mark Zuckerberg Hacker ethic Timeline of computer security hacker history Hackers Manifesto at Phrack Magazine
