MetaFilter posts tagged with computers and hackers

Great Cyber Crimes and Hacks

netbros — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:44:22 -0800

The best criminal hacker is the one that isn't caught — or even identified. These are 10 of the most infamous unsolved computer crimes as selected by PC Magazine. However, some do get caught. Here are nine of the most infamous criminal hackers to ever see the inside of a jail cell. PCMag also reached back into the early days of computing and dredged up the most inspiring examples of hacker brilliance they could find. WANK Worm MoD Skynet satellite hacked CDUniverse credit card breach Military source code stolen Anti-DRM Kucinich on CBSNews.com ApplyYourself hack 26,000 site attack Hannaford and Sweetbay credit card breach Comcast.net redirected

Cyber Command Über Alles

homunculus — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:55:24 -0800

Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You! Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA

Herding Zombies

dersins — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 11:03:09 -0800

Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works. "In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."

arnab — Fri, 03 May 2002 23:01:15 -0800

Competition to "reverse engineer" mystery program.
Another cool thingy from the HoneyNet Project; they're inviting people to convert a binary file into its original source. So, who's participating?

mecran01 — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 07:46:22 -0800

Lord of the Hackers? Sherri Turkle writes in the NYT:

Adolescents are wise in the psychology of computer games and Middle Earth. They live in a world they can't control, in a body that seems increasingly alien. To them the computer world is soothing, offering reassurance through mastery. Just as each episode of "The Lord of the Rings" presents a danger and each has its resolution, so many adolescent boys move from one block of intransigent code to another, from one screen to the next, declaring victory as they go. But this distinction is about more than gender; it is about ways of looking at the world — real, imagined or computer-generated. Some pioneers of computing had a style of working that rewarded risk. They spoke of programming itself as though it were a dangerous quest. At M.I.T. computer hackers even had a name for it: "sport death." To pull back from the impending doom of a system crash required near magic, an almost empathetic knowledge of the intricacies of code. For this community, a certain bravado came to be seen as valuable, even necessary, beyond the world of programming.

Any programmer-hobbits care to comment on this? This doesn't exactly describe my feelings when unsnarling html.

dglynn — Wed, 09 Jan 2002 22:53:51 -0800

Hackers: Computer Outlaws A TLC show(that I'm 3/4 through) that seems to actually use reliable sources to discuss not just cracker behavior, but also the creative side of hackers, pointing out the developments attributed to some hackers. Now Markoff and Mitnick. Not a bad little show....

o2b — Thu, 29 Nov 2001 09:27:24 -0800

AirSnort. The dangerous app with the unlikely name allows users to snatch data being passed over wireless networks, eventually capturing passwords to the network.

machaus — Thu, 18 Oct 2001 07:20:40 -0800

Is it sloppy programming, or do full computer security vulnerability disclosure make it too easy for hackers? Microsoft has a personal interest in minimizing the exploit of their code, but the evil you know is better than the evil you don't. Others have weighed in on this debate in the past, or provided a fair but vague blueprint for the computer security community. Do you think that a middle ground exists?

Steven Den Beste — Fri, 09 Mar 2001 10:20:11 -0800

One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.

Steven Den Beste — Wed, 19 Apr 2000 16:30:28 -0800

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)

greyscale — Tue, 28 Mar 2000 20:12:54 -0800

Cyber Patrol hacker sells out for one dollar < I made my political point and just don't want further annoyance... ...Mattel initiated legal action in e-mail subpoenas in mid-March and Skala and Jansson removed cphack from their sites, but not before urging computer activists to copy and distribute it.... ...Nevertheless, some mirror site operators think open source software protections make the issue moot. The court cannot impose an Internet ban because cphack was released under the GNU General Public License... > perhaps you've seen this--the final decision will be interesting with repect to free speech and the GNU GPL. something to watch anyhow.

Awol — Fri, 11 Feb 2000 10:05:49 -0800

Uncle Sam wants YOU to solve the internet's problems. President Clinton announced yesterday that, due to a complete lack of knowledge about the internet, it will cost $2 billion in 2001 to develop anti-hacker secuity. Plus they intend on subsidizing college costs for computer science majors that agree to work for the government. Hey if he'd give me just one million dollars, I'd be able to pay off my school costs and hunt down hackers personally, like Boba Fett.

mathowie — Mon, 24 Jan 2000 11:47:24 -0800

Last night Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.