Dublin 2600 meet first Friday of each month

Of course, you are all white hats, yes I know...hacking only for knowledge as was the great Kevin Mitnick! Question, If you hack a red hat linux box, does that make you a red hat hacker? :rolleyes: But seriously folks...:D

There used to be a good discussion on the "hacker" terminology and "1337 5p34k" at www.hackthissite.com (before they redesigned the site) and believe me the folks at hackthissite are in no way businessmen They are political activists of the "take the streets back, people power" variety.

In my view, a hacker is more than just a programmer and not all hackers are virus-writers as you seem to imply.

I stress that these are simple definitions only of the following terms and that in reality the situation is more complicated:

Programer: Writes computer programs in any number of languages that perform a useful, useless or fun function. They learn about operating systems but are quite happy to leave them alone and use them solely as they were intended to be used.

White-hat: Uses programming and general computer OS knowledge to explore a program, application, website or OS. Sometimes a white-hat will gain entry to and alter the code of one of the pre-mentioned to perform a task other than was originally intended. This task will be benign, non-destructive and within the rules of law. The approach is, learn by doing. Many IT Security consultants descriobe themselves as white-hat hackers.

Black-Hat: Uses programming and general computer OS knowledge to explore a program, application or OS. A black-hat will gain entry to and alter one of the pre-mentioned to perform a task other than was originally intended. This task will usually be destructive, used to gain access to confidential data and outside the boundries of the rule of law. The approach is to learn but also to do harm.

Grey-Hat: As above except that the grey-hat approach is that you can do the wrong thing for the right reason e.g launching a dDOS attack on a child-porn site takes the site out of action, therefore good! However, this approach breaks the law and also forces the site owner to beef up security, move servers and still operate without being caught. The best approach ehre is to report such sites to the police.

Script kiddie: The lowest of the low, usually use other peoples code to perform attacks, most commonly website defacement and dDOS attacks. These people find something that works and use it again and again until the exploit is patched. They do not try to learn how the code works they just want to disrupt vulnerable machines.

Blue Hat: Interestingly Blue hat is now taken to mean those who attend Microsoft "try to hack Windows" challenges. A legitimate arena for those who want to attack Windows OS without getting jailed A long time ago this was a term applied to a special type of phone-phreaker (not long after the original 2600MHz hacks).

Zero-day: Not a type of hacker at all so should not have been in the list Average Joe!! Zero-day was/is a specific exploit found in IE (no surprise there) that allows complete control of a computer when the user visits a malicious website containing code to take advantage of the exploit. This was used by black-hats and script-kiddies mostly although some grey hats used it to take over dozens of machines and then send messages to the owners telling them to update their security. Their are still plenty of machines not protected against zero-day.

uber-hacker: Usually written without the umlaut over the u. These are well-known and well respected hackers who have contributed to the knowledge of the hacking world. They almost never refer to themselves in that way, knowing how sad that would be

Sorry for the long post but there are plenty of real hackers/crackers out there who still define themselves by these terms (usually the long-time hackers or the complete no-hopers who think it makes them look cool. Like any club the terminology grows...look at forum posters, after a while they all know what 'lol' and 'lmao' amongst others means!

All-in-all a hacker is just someone who loves computers and some use the knowledge just for their own pleasure, some for destruction and others for financial gain, some for all three

bedlam wrote:

The whole thing, while the IE bug may have been 0day, Zero Day is not limited to a particular IE bug (which ever one you are refering to).

True, I phrased that rather badly (my apologies, trying to be too clever!) but as most bugs are zero day you can't merely describe a hacker as zero day, because they can still be categorised into one of the above classes and yes, it is usually, black hats, gray hats and script kiddies who jump on the zero day bandwagon!

Zero day protection mechanisms are becoming more effective but many (older) machines still don't have even basic protection against zero day type exploits.

Well, I messed up on that response anyway, so I see how easy i is to misunderstand what has been written! My own pet-hate is leet speak, I use r3nu4l as my signature name as a form of satirical irony (r3nu4l = renual = mis-spelling of renewal). God, I'm such a wit!

Errm, it wasn't businessmen who first named people as white/black hat or whatever, these "childish" terms were first designed by the hackers themselves to differentiate the activities of one another.

I agree that the security consultant companies try to scare the life out of you to sell their products but there are plenty of free apps out there designed by security consultants/white hats (or whatever) in their spare time, for the thrill of it.

I'd love to discuss this further but we have already hijacked this thread and caused it to spill over another page. I might open up a thread elsewhere, or you can if you like??
Cheers,;)

r3nu4l wrote:

I'd love to discuss this further but we have already hijacked this thread and caused it to spill over another page. I might open up a thread elsewhere, or you can if you like??
Cheers,;)

Did you not understand? :rolleyes: