Hacking
...as what happened in the cold war. Randall et al. (2000) focus on another type of hackers related to organizations and business, this hacker can be a company’s competitor, who is interested in business statistics or future plans. Hacking such information is beneficial to other companies so that they can change their plans in accordance to what was hacked and try to build strategies that cause failure and damage to others. This leads us to analyze and study the motivations and the thoughts of hackers and the reason behind performing illegal activities. Motivations behind Hacking The motivations behind hacking are an issue that is discussed heavily due to the importance of understanding the hacker’s psychology and the fuel that encourages him/her to perform such illegal activities, also because hackers view about what they are doing is far different from our views as victims Furnell (2002). Taylor (1999) found that hacking is motivated by the desire of imposing power and improving knowledge, searching for convenience rather than making money. It’s a matter of self convenience and satisfaction so that’s why motivations differ from one hacker to another but they all share the feel of addiction, curiosity and the need to impose their power while Levy ( in Taylor, 1999) discussed the role of own thoughts and ethics in motivating the hacker; she believes that hacker thoughts were the main motivator, the thoughts focused on the freedom of information which means that information should be easily accessed by all people at any time, but since regulations and security tools limited accessibility and began to interfere with the freedom of information, hackers helped people to return back their right of instant access of any source of information. After seventeen years Selwyn and Gorard (2001) proved levy right and found that hackers do believe that knowledge and information should be shared and there is no need for information owning because accessing information is one of the basic rights people should have. Himanen (2001) believes that the thought of information sharing was the reason behind the failure and bankruptcy of many companies that were the target of many hacking attacks in the name of information sharing and defending the community rights. Sterling (2004) believes that information should be shared but with mentioning who is the owner and with the permission of doing that because knowledge should be spread away and not to be limited or restricted and hacking is not the proper way of doing this. Pipkin (1997) on the other hand reveals the challenging part of the hacker’s personality as the biggest motivation; this means that the hacker feels the joy and excitement when hacking systems that are provided with the almost perfect security tools. Randall et al. (2000) see the excitement as the major reason while Banks (1997) relates hacking to finding jobs which means if hackers were caught breaking into the system, the hacked system owners will offer the hacker highly paid job just for the sake of protecting their system from other intruders. Crucial paradigm (2003) includes that money had never been a motivator but in some cases hackers look for money because that will enable them to create unreal online shopping sites to collect payment details or to gain entry to servers displaying credit cards details. Motivations behind hacking are difficult to capture because it’s related to each hacker way of thinking or belief or sometimes the type of hack is used as an excuse for the illegal activity as what Pipkin (1997:8) stated “there are many hackers who don’t consider themselves criminals because they are not stealing money, credit cards, computer hardware, or anything made of atoms. Rather, they are only making copies of software and data and utilizing computer resources”. And also Thomas and Loader (2000) showed the result of a study done by asking different people about differences between hackers. The majority responded that hackers are not alike and they differ so much from each other since their motivations are different while Furnell (2002) judged hackers depending on the harm they cause whatever was their motivation, because hacking is a disease and should be removed so that the effect of hacker attacks will be minimized. Types of attack Pipkin (1997) lists a number of hacking attacks that are most commonly used in breaking system and causing disruption and damage for services. These attacks can be summarized as following: 1. Software Theft: means software will be hacked by producing illegal copies and selling them without the permission of the owner. This will result in bankruptcy and failure to companies that spend millions developing and creating software that will be sold later on with the cheapest prices in an unauthorized way. 2. Theft of business secrets: means that trading and business information are stolen for the benefit of other companies. 3. Theft of information: means that all types of information and data are stolen for a particular benefit or self motivation. 4. Denial of service: means that hacker will break into a system and disable different operations and cancel all account so that all users won’t be able to access their own information. 5. Terrorism: known as information terrorism and occurs when dataflow is disrupted causing the system to break down and stop providing services for a period of time. On the other hand Crucial paradigm (2003) talks specifically about forms and techniques of computer and network attacks and summarize them in five points as following: 1. Distributed denial of service attacks: means that the system crashes or stops working for a period of time due to flood of messages or requests. 2. Trojan horse: software installed on computer systems and treated as another software. It shuts down the system or allows you to hack other people. It enables others to enter your system or sets itself when triggered. 3. Viruses: most commonly used, the procedure of viruses is to spread and repeat itself then destroy or attack the system. 4. Websites: use known security holes to track your web browser and then perform harmful activities. 5. Worms: used for hacking big systems. It uses all available resources to cause overload to the system and difficulty to function. Talking about attacks leads us to the question of what are the characteristics of them. Taylor (1999) listed the main characteristics of hacking attacks in three points: 1. Simplicity: means that the attack should be simple in appearance but the effects are impressive and the results will be as pleasing to the hacker as what he planned for. It means that do your job in a smart and easy way. 2. Mastery: the methods used in hacking contain sophisticated knowledge which is difficult for anyone to understand. The reason behind mastery is to make sure that the hacker is the only one who can solve the problem being caused. 3. Illicitness: means that the act is against all rules and laws. Hacking should be halted and stopped. To know how to stop it we should know the reason behind the birth of hack, and to know why to stop it we should know the consequences and effects of hacking. ICT and the birth of Hacking Randall et al. (2000:15) state that “as long as there have been computers, there have been hackers”. It’s clear here that the birth of computer technology helped in the birth of hackers and computer psychos. Since internet and computer technology had spread away and became available to different people around the globe, information crime including hacking appeared as an enormous problem due to professionals or experts who realized the benefit of information for their own use. ICT development was so fast and provided different facilities and services in a short span of time, but at the same time ICT helped in building hacking environments because the speed of ICT development and improvement was not matched with the speed of information security technologies development, so it allowed hackers to feel free in doing what they want Taylor (1999). It was ICT failure to provide high quality security technology that encouraged people who turned to be hackers to access information in unauthorized way without the fear of being caught. Furnell (2002:190) stated that “hackers have established their own communities on the internet”. That’s because internet provides cheap access to everyone enabling the occurrence of illegal activities. According to Chakrabarti and Manimaran (2002) ICT should have provided security features to protect their findings and inventions then think about how to develop them. This means that ICT major problem that it was so fascinated by the fast development and ignored or totally forgot to protect and save the earlier inventions, this helped hackers to break into systems gaining benefit from security gaps and weaknesses. Thomas and Loader (2000) believe that the development of ICT played a big role in building a hacking community, not only because ICT development is faster than security development, but also because ICT provided new chances and opportunities of hacking by including different and huge information data bases that are appealing to any person, this encouraged hackers to begin their illegal actions helped by the lack of capable security infrastructure. Effects on Society Hacking effects can be categorized into three types; effects on individuals, organizations, economy and effects on countries. The most important issue to recognize is that victims are the only ones who feel the threat and effects of hacking attacks, and our duty is to inform other people about the danger of hacking to be cautious and alert which helps in preventing hacking attacks from happening Furnell (2002). The effects are as following: 1. Effects on individuals: according to Banks (1997) there are cases where individual information is sold and used for bad purposes like using their accounts. While Seo (2001) focuses on the psychology of individuals after being hacked and that they will always have the fear of being monitored when accessing internet and information, added to that the privacy of users can be easily penetrated. According to Thomas and Loader (2000) credit card details and passwords can be stolen causing financial damage to individuals added to that computer systems can be hacked causing the machine to stop working as usual or stealing your data. These effects will cause frustration and fear to individuals when using ICT. 2. Effects on organizations and economy: hacking is said to have cost the global economy an estimated $1.2 Billion Niccolai (2000). Hacking caused and still causing till the moment bankruptcy to plenty of companies, that’s because companies are being hacked plenty of times which leads to the loss of customer confidence or belief in the security capabilities of the company Furnell (2002). Banks (1997) believes that companies are a main target for hackers who break into their systems to steal trade information or customer’s payment details. Pipkin (1997) focuses on denial of service and the effects on companies. The company server will be broken due to huge traffic causing customer frustration and hurt the company reputation. Same for software theft that causes bankruptcy to companies which spend millions to develop and create software that sadly later on is stolen and copied for cheap prices. The main problem is that some companies hire or use hackers to break into other competitor systems to s...