Hackers and Crackers

Paper Summary:

The paper examines the topic of criminally motivating hacking referred to by computer professionals as "cracking." The paper examines the current methods used, the degree of sophistication of malicious programs and the rising use of rootkit "bots" that literally hijack computers to do the cracker's bidding and are almost impossible to detect.

From the Paper:

"The days of the prodigal teenager computer- geek breaking into a presumably "well" protected network system as a prank has gone the way of the 5- inch floppy disk. Boasting rights in a virtual subterranean world of peers generally were behind such intrusions. Few if any "hackers" as they called themselves thought of the consequences of their acts: the disrupted services and systems downtime they may inadvertently have triggered. Most were simply immature, a few malicious. To be called a hacker back then was to be paid a compliment. It meant simply that you were a very good programmer (Palmer 2001, p. 769). It is the "black hat" variant of hacking--the criminal exploitation of one's programming skills that has become a worldwide menace and earned its practitioners the derogatory label "cracker.""

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• Term Paper # 112378 : "Vulnerability of Network Systems"

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