Wednesday, July 03, 2013

review the book "Profiling Hackers"

I've been reading the book of Profiling Hackers recently. For now, I only looked through a little bit. There are some topics are very interesting, so I'd like to share with you guys.
 
This book listed some questions below:

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Why am I interested in hacking?
What are my objectives?
What am I trying to obtain through hacking?
What do I want to become?
What do I want people to think of me?
How do I want to be remembered, and what for?
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It's the matter of the motivation of hacking. IMHO, hackers are always hacking for fun and yes, indeed( we can't deny it, right-_-) ..the profit. AlpheOne's paper's title was sort of philosophical metaphors;-) Both of motivations( fun/profit) are very important. Because if a security guy only care about one of them, it would be devastating for a person( hacker)'s life. 
 
* Fun? To some hackers, hacking is part of their life. They can't live with hacking. They are happy with joy while writing exploit...
 
* Profit? Money, of course. White hat working for commercial company. Black hat?
 
* Both White and Black are possible to sale exploit or get involve with underground business
 
 
But....as a hacker, if we: 
Only having the "fun" part. too spiritual dude... and it's hard to make the people( industry) believe you in real-life sec engineering.... Well, if the security is not your day job, that's another story;-)

Only having the "profit" part:
even worse, just like a lot of security conference runners( whores-_-) who only having one slide/topic and guffing around the world. They are a bunch of dead walks

As a real hacker, I do believe that he/she would have both of them.

And, the book also talking about the common trait of hackers, no matters of age, profession, ethnic, etc:
 
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* They usually have an above average IQ and great technical and problem-solving skills.
* They are brilliant adolescents, suffocated by an inadequate school system and by ill-prepared or poorly equipped teachers.
* They generally come from problem families.
* They rebel against all symbols or expressions of authority.
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It's true. Except the 3rd one is a little bit of vague. How to define the "problem families"? Divorce? or others? If it is mean that a family is lack of proper( btw: wth is *proper*) educate/homeschool for the kid, well...it'd be mean a huge number of families.

I'm not finish the reading. It's really great book. I never found a book which giving a way in sociology to discussion about hackers. The Hacker ethic and the spirit of Information age did some aspect of the work, but Pekka was more focus on the generic hacker( not only in computer/sec field).

2 comments:

Dr-Hack said...

I would like to know why would you used the word "Hackology" ?
:P

Unknown said...

to Dr-hack:
Well, it's a little bit hard to explain the term "Hackology". I'll try to make it short. In ancient Greek, philosophers had the concept of logos, which means the original version of information. Now, we have a lot of branch of logos which ended with "logy", such as psychology, biology, methodology. IMHO, I think hacker ethic is born for this era: Information age. It's not only matter of technique but a whole new world view and methodology( which the dot connect with the prev ones)........