The urge to hack
Analysis/Commentary
Like so many unsatisfactory epithets, the term "hacker" has often been
abused. It refers at once to harmless programmers and to crackers,
law-breakers who seek to trespass into protected networks. I refer here to
the latter kind of hacker.
What makes this guy (or gal) tick? What possible benefits could result in
trampling someone else's flower bed? The urge may be seen as a type of
childish cruelty connected with restricting someone's right to live, breathe, and move. People in authority frequently regress to this infantile sense of pleasure when they fail to give others their due respect and credit. Hackers, it would seem, enjoy stolen freedoms, intellectualize them like cryptographers, and turn logic upsidedown.
David Friedman and Charles Mann describe a hacker's illicit zeal in their
profile of "Matt Singer." Their book @ Large (the Strange Case of the
World's Biggest Internet Invasion, 1997)helps assess the subculture of
hackers. Singer eluded the FBI for months, cracking network after network,
stealing passwords, employing remote computers as repositories for stolen programs, and generally running system administrators ragged.
He cracked into classified networks like a vagabond straying into forbidden orchards where a few scrawny apples were enough to give him pride. For him, hacking was a vocation, a solitary obsessive activity that wholly represented his life's work and calling.
Singer might not have succeeded in causing disruption had he not met a few
mentors in hacker chatrooms. These co-conspirators taught him tricks and
lent him hacking tools. With all the time in the world on his hands, Singer
spent hours inserting trojan programs into UNIX servers, or running
password decryption tools on hijacked remote computers. In the end, no
network seemed impervious to his jiggling.
He would gain "root access" (top level control of servers), swing from
computer to computer, and delve deep into military and scientific systems.
Most of the time, he didn't even seem to understand what he was doing, but
his pranks serve as a primer for current counter-hackers, the security experts
who seek to keep today's networks safe.
The hacker was never prosecuted because he was deemed by the FBI unfit
for trial, but his reign of terror stands as a warning of the mischief a
determined individual can stir up on the Net.
October 11, 2000
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