So far in our hacker series of shows we’ve concentrated mostly on the more nefarious
type of hacking, a milieu consisting of what’s known as black hat hackers.
These are the guys, and girls, that have honed their skills to get through backdoors and
steal information that they might sell on, hold ransom, or simply use to buy something
on your credit card.
They might also want to cause mayhem just because they can.
Then we have the grey hats, and those guys often exploit a vulnerability in a system
and then tell a company or organization that they have a problem, a digital Achilles heel,
and you can pay them or hire them to fix it for you.
But now let’s have a look at the unsung heroes of hacking, the protectors of the binary
realm, the white hats.
So, who are these guys, the white hats, the ethical specialists of finding faults in systems
and patching up holes?
According to Techopedia, they are experts that are hired by companies or other entities
to break into systems.
“Here you go, do your best,” an employee might tell them.
They have in some cases been hired from the darkside – usually not the hyper-criminally
darkside – and so are the perfect fit.
After all, if you wanted to hire someone to ensure no one robs your bank why not hire
a bank robber.
They are there to make sure their nemeses, the black hats, can’t do damage.
Their methods of hacking of course might be very similar to the black hats, they might
have trained on the same training ground, but their job is to try and keep one step
ahead of their foes, or the company’s foes.
They are indispensable, and they are not just protecting company or government information
but protecting you.
You all have information online that you don’t want to be seen, don’t want stolen, and
in part it’s thanks to these people that you can sleep at night with the assurance
that the data you put online remains protected.
You could call them gatekeepers of information, except they are also highly skilled burglars.
The best ones we’ll talk about soon.
If you’ve seen our other shows on hackers you’ll know that organizations are keen
to hire these people, some of whom have been less ethical about hacking in the past.
You might have governmental departments showing up to hacker conferences and headhunting individuals
with a certain skillset.
One problem there, as Rolling Stone reported, is that some of those guys might have the
skills, but they are not exactly office material and some of them have criminal records – not
really good on a resume for an FBI interview.
Oftentimes organizations want to tempt the bad guys to the good side, but we could say
there is a certain level of badness which might preclude that transition ever being
made.
Still, we are about to tell you about some former black hats that did do a fair bit of
damage before they hooked-up with the good guys and donned an office-regulation tie.
Kevin Mitnick We have talked about this man before, but
we can’t do a show on white hats without including someone who is often called the
world’s most famous hacker.
Let’s first say that Mitnick was imprisoned for his crimes, but he’s often said his
‘blackness’ was overstated and he was made an example of.
He is somewhat the poster boy of hacking, having been the inspiration for some of those
hacking movies which depicted 80s kids giving the government a hard time from their bedrooms.
Mitnick has said that his early hacking wasn’t really techno-hacking but human exploitation,
sometimes called social engineering.
If you’ve seen the series Mr. Robot you’ll know that hackers often get information merely
by deceit on the telephone.
That series was partly written by people who know hacking, and social engineering works.
But Mitnick graduated to computers and ended up hacking companies such as Nokia and Pacific
Bell.
He went on the run after that but he was eventually found and sentenced to a long jail sentence
for the crime he committed.
During his five years behind bars he has said he was treated badly and did quite a bit of
time in solitary confinement.
His real love wasn’t stealing per se, but he just enjoyed testing his skills.
At 16-years old for instance he created a program that simulated the computers at school,
and so when a teacher logged in Mitnick could get the information.
“I took his password, logged in, and just had a huge smile on my face that it worked,”
he said in an interview in 2018.
But his curiosity got the better of him and his world turned darker.
After prison, though, he started his own security company and concentrated his efforts on helping
others to stave off black hats.
In an interview he explained this switch quite clearly, “It was a vicious cycle.
I got busted, did it again, got busted, did it again.
In a way, I still do it today…but now I just get permission from my clients and get
paid.”
Adrian Lamo Unfortunately this hacker is no longer with
us, having passed away in 2018.
He gained his notoriety for hacking The New York Times as well as tech behemoths Microsoft
and Yahoo.
But his world came crashing down in 2003 when he was arrested for those hacks as well as
others.
He took it on the chin, though, saying in court, “I want to answer for what I have
done and do better with my life.”
He also later said, “We all own our actions in fullness, not just the pleasant aspects
of them.”
In 2009, Lamo was involved in a controversial case involving US whistleblower Bradley (now
Chelsea) Manning.
The latter had confided to the wrong man, as Lamo was working for law enforcement and
he blew the whistle on the whistleblower.
Subsequently many people around the world criticized Lamo, and many of his detractors
were in the hacking community.
He became an outcast.
Lamo later explained his actions to The Guardian, saying, “There were hundreds of thousands
of documents – let's drop the number to 250,000 to be conservative – and doing nothing
meant gambling that each and every one would do no harm if no warning was given.”
He later went to the light side and became a security consultant, but his life was never
easy after the Manning controversy.
He received death threats regularly and he was also known to abuse substances.
When he died in 2018 his autopsy was inconclusive.
Here we have dark to light to the great unknown.
Robert Tappan Morris A New York Times headline from 1989 reads,
“CORNELL SUSPENDS COMPUTER STUDENT.”
The story tells of a 23-year old student who had “jammed a nationwide computer network.”
What had Morris been up to?
Well, he is now known as the man that created the first worm-like virus, known as the Morris
Internet Worm.
All over the place computers were slowing and crashing and no one knew what had happened.
This worm that Morris had created he intended not to wreak havoc, and it’s said he only
created it to see how far it would spread and so be able to judge the size of the internet.
Except it just kept replicating and soon he couldn’t stop it.
We are told that when it was done the worm had infected 10 percent of the world’s Internet
servers, which is some accomplishment.
According to one of Morris’s friends back then, the student knew he had made a “colossal”
mistake.
He was later arrested and charged under the then new computer fraud and abuse act, getting
off lightly with just a $10,000 fine and a few hundred hours of community service.
If you did that now you’d get yourself into way more trouble.
Since breaking the Internet, Morris has dedicated his time towards research and he also co-founded
the incubator company Y-Combinator.
He has tenure at MIT and has served as an advisor to various companies.
Kevin Poulsen Also known as Dark Dante in another life,
Mr. Poulsen rose to notoriety after doing something we’d all likely love to do.
He won himself a Porsche, but he didn’t exactly play the game fairly.
To ensure that won he hacked a radio station’s phone lines.
He made it so he was guaranteed to be the winner.
But then he graduated from phone lines to hacking into federal systems and getting his
hands on FBI wiretap information.
He was eventually caught and ended up with a $56,000 fine and also a prison sentence.
In an interview with Gizmodo in 2015, Poulsen said that he was busy consulting for a Hollywood
hacker movie.
He also became a journalist and at times has helped law enforcement track down darker characters
that plague the Internet.
As for hacking, he said in an interview that it often starts with phishing.
He said a hacker will often send a phishing email to a person working in a big organization
such as the NSA.
The email looks legitimate because the hacker has learned what kind of email the agent might
get.
He also said this in another interview, this time with Vanity Fair, “You certainly are
seeing that these days attacking somebody’s P.C., instead of attacking their server, and
logging their key strokes and all of that.
This is exactly what the hackers are doing right now.”
So, beware folks.
Mark Abene This hacker was once a member of the hacking
conglomerates Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception.
He started young, and became one of the world’s most famous hackers after he was arrested
by authorities in 1990.
He was accused of various things, including crashing the network of AT&T.
He was a minor when he did that, but still served a year in prison and was handed 600
hours of community service.
Many thought he didn’t deserve this, and yet again they said another person had been
made an example of.
This seems to happen often, because there’s nothing more authorities fear than someone
sneaking around in their networks.
Abene went on to do lots of TV appearances and speaking about security to some of the
world’s leading publications.
He also started his own consultancy firm, but that didn’t do too well.
“After my own consulting firm folded after the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, I continued
doing independent security consulting for a lot of large companies,” Abene told CNET
in an interview.
“A fun job I had recently was writing the encryption routines for the online streaming
service for Major League Baseball.”
Anon and famous The people we have talked about are just some
names you see in the media, but black hat hackers that have turned into white hat hackers
are usually nameless.
They are guys that have just been taken out of the wild and brought into the office.
We know that the FBI has employed some of these people, but reports tell us the likes
of Google, Uber and even Starbucks have been putting reformed black hats on their payroll.
We might also remember that the likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey
also hacked into emails (Zuckerberg) and a network of a potential employer (Dorsey),
and no doubt many others have done similar things.
What do you think about Black and White hat hackers?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other show Did North Korea Really Hack Sony Pictures
Because Of a Movie?.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.