Features

I hacked you

Two professional blackhats open up about how they work, who hires them and how they get paid.

21 September 2015

Clifford Stoll’s classic 1980s’ tale of computer security, The Cuckoo’s Egg, tells how he stalked a hacker across the internet for ten months and watched him breaking in to research institutions and military websites, looking for sensitive information. The hacker used default passwords, security holes in operating systems and old-fashioned persistence to access systems and download classified material that he would then sell to the KGB. Stoll’s story has little technical material in it. It’s far more about how he nagged and cajoled the FBI, CIA and military to see what the hacker was doing as a threat to the US’ national security.

But that was then. In 1986, an internet connection was an exclusive club limited mainly to the military and universities. Today, much of the world is connected to the internet, often using more than one device. And instead of lone programmers making money breaking into systems and networks for shadowy foreign government agencies, there are now armies of them.

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