Archive | November, 2004

A few Malaysia sites got 0wned hard this morning…by some group who’s ultra cheese tagline is ‘Hacking for Jesus’

Brother please…

The site in question is https://www.mada.gov.my/[/url] if you visit around the time I posted this you’ll still see the real thing..

If not screenshot:

A lot of .my sites got whacked apparently by these guys, probably some lame mass defacement (lots of web sites on the same physical machines), check out Zone-H[/url].

This kind of stuff also has a cheesy name, it’s called ‘Hacktivism‘ something to do with ‘Technopolitics’…

If you are going to deface pages (ultimate skiddy behaviour) at least admit why you are doing it, because of your stupid adolescent ego ok…no other reason.

A huge amount of it goes on, I classify it as new age graffiti, most of it is ugly pointless and ego based..but puhlease…not hacking for Jesus, that’s just plain WRONG.

I found out originally from my friend Dhillon at Hack in the Box.

Real hackers don’t deface web pages…actually the truly scary blackhat hackers are unheard of…no one even knows they exist..

They say 80% of fortune 500 companies still have unknown backdoors(covert entry channels unknown except to those who put them there).

Anyway this could turn into some long winded and setting the world to rights…so here we go. Prepare to be enlightened.

Hackers are not people who deface web sites (defacing means changing the content to a funny pictures, personal message or as in en vogue now a political message).

Hackers are people with a love of technology and in general how things work, they have inquisitive minds, curious souls and unlike most they need to know WHY and HOW things work..not just that they work.

The media often mislabels crackers as hackers..

To quote wikipedia, which sums it up pretty well:

Currently, “hacker” is used in two main ways, one positive and one pejorative. It can be used in the computing community to describe a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert (for example: “Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is a genius hacker.”). This is said by some to be the “correct” usage of the word (see the Jargon File definition below). In popular usage and in the media, however, it generally describes computer intruders or criminals. “Hacker” can be seen as a shibboleth, identifying those who use it in its positive sense as members of the computing community.

As you can see the negative term has crept into the media and is firmly taken hold..this annoys most of us in the ‘hacking’ community..

It is true there is a middle ground, some skills are used by people from both sides of the fence, but those running downloaded scripts from the net (script kiddies) without any comprehension of what they do should be spanked back to high-school and definately not given the respect worthy title of hackers.

I suggest reading the whole Wikipedia post if you are interested, it pretty much covers all bases, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker

There are also a few more classifications which you might have heard, Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat.

Black Hats are the ‘bad’ guys, doing malicious stuff, busting up networks and writing DDoS tools, they are still proper hackers, they are just on the wrong side of the law, Script Kiddies are by no means blackhat…they are just plain idiotic.

White Hats are the ‘good’ guys…security professionals, ethical hackers, whatever you want to call them, the people reaping the money in the security industry, some are excellent, most are not…more skill always lies on the Black Hat side in my experience..The good guys, as with anything are always playing catch-up. Mostly Hacking for fame, notierity, money, altruism or any non-malicious cause.

Grey Hats are the happy medium…perhaps a past in Black Hat activities…or some experience of malicious hacking, moved into the security industry in a professional role and cleaned up…or just undefined…somewhere in the grey wasteland between..I think I am regarded as being here.

There is another metric which is a basic 3-tier pyramid..at the top, the thin part is the elite, the super hackers, those few geniuses that discover new types of vulnerability, write tools like nmap, write the Linux Kernel and so on…then below this is a slightly bigger tier which contains people like me, talented sys-admins, skilled security professional, not super genius status…but good and generally respected…Then at the bottom is the largest part, far larger than the other 2 combined together many times over..this contains the dross, the script kiddies, the people that think having a MSCE makes them god..

I also love the Conscience of a Hacker, from Phrack Magazine…also known as The Hackers Manifesto, it’ll give you some insight into the real hacker mindset..

It’s something I identify with…it’s a beautiful piece of writing, and when I read it the first time I ‘tingled’ haha…I’ve bolded those lines that have been part of my life..

+++The Mentor+++

My area of hacking is information…I am information scientist, gathering it, adapting it, improving it, collaborating it, dissemenating it..I am also good at taking good things and making them better..I am a hacker in the kitchen, the living room and in the world of bits and bytes…

This post is far too long anyway, perhaps I shall continue this topic another day..it just started out about a simple web-page defacement…