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Have you had your credit card information stolen? Or discovered you have a virus or Trojan lurking within your PC? Or wake up to discover that your website has crashed and all your critical files have been stolen or corrupted? Who do most people blame for such acts? The blaming finger points to the notorious groups of individuals known as hackers. These hackers are “The same people who pioneered artificial intelligence and the personal computer also ushered in phone phreaking, lock hacking, and computer intrusion.” Usually the image of hackers is misleading for the media displays them as nerdy teens that seek cyber destruction or cheat systems and vandalize them. By looking deeper inside this sub-culture more facts and truth arise and we can see that labeling all hackers as malicious is wrong. Nevertheless there are evil hackers there who are not misrepresented, but hackers are intriguing individuals who not only attack but also defend in the cyber world and in other technological areas. It is the hacker who pushes companies to utilize stronger and more advanced security devices and also urge companies to enhance their own employees’ skills. Without these individuals we would not have such powerful hi-tech equipment or knowledge as we do today. Despite the righteous name hackers desire and want back, there exist subcategories of hackers who, in the eye of a true hacker, fall into the lower class status of their kind. They are the “wannabes” and “thieves” who give hackers the false and infamous title as seen in the media. In his magazine article, “Meet the Hackers,” Daintry Duffy addresses subcategories of hackers like sneakers, crackers, phreakers, and script kiddies. He describes a sneaker as someone who is paid to break into a computer system for security testing. A cracker is pretty much the same except they are usually not paid by officials to test a system’s security, but rather break into the system to steal or destroy information. To do this, crackers implement cracking techniques such as password cracking or using weaknesses and exploits of computers or their software to break into them. A phreaker, or sometimes called a phone phreak, is “one who practices the art and science of cracking the phone network” (Jargon File, version 4.1.0.) Phreakers do what they do for many reasons, making free long distance calls, tapping into lines, etc. Last but not least, there’s the script kiddies, the “scum” of all hackers. These are individuals who “do mischief with scripts and programs written by others, often without understanding the exploit” (Jargon File, version 4.1.0). These people are usually young teens who have no programming skills and therefore just want to quench their destructive hacking thirsts by using pre-made scripts. A hacker is someone we love and hate at the same time. We cannot help but fear the attacks and frauds they can commit, but we also awe at the level of knowledge and creativity some possess. The mind of a hacker is one that questions many things and is eager to test the objects potential. In her book entitled The Second Self:] Computers and the Human Spirit, Sherry Turkle talks about hackers and the history behind them. She brings up how the first breed of hackers were in fact MIT students, bright kids who soon discovered “that there were new and unusual things that you could do with computers that once were things that punched cards” (Turkle par.6). The fame of hackers rose when movies such as War Games came out, luring people to see a population of people they barely knew.
Approximate Word count = 2297
Approximate Pages = 9.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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