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Why does a hacker become a hacker?
I was talking to a friend who said that there's a huge population of black hat hackers centered in one region of Romania -- he told me about how a large portion of the inhabitants either end up being geniuses and working for prominent tech corporations, or they end up wreaking havoc on the internet.
So maybe it's a naive question... but why? Opportunity? A disregard for authority? Something else?
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9 Answers
This is one of those questions that really doesn't have a definitive answer. It's kind of like George Mallory's response to "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?"... because it's there.
Unfortunately the term hacker has taken on the negative connotation that we have assigned to it over the past 25+ years or so. I don't believe the likes of Peter Deutsch, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Tom Knight, and Jerry Sussman started out with the intention of disrupting computer systems. They were just curious about how things worked - even things as banal as model train controllers.
I think a big part of what drives the hackers to which you refer is that same sense of curiosity combined with with George Mallory's perspective. We've always been curious about how things work and we'll stop at nothing to reach our goal of achieving that understanding. For your definition (black hat) you need to add in the notion that there is a perceived imbalance of authority, which can somehow be brought into equilibrium, or even shifted in favor of the hacker or some other bigger or more noble cause, by attacking the "system."
So, with that said, let me suggest a few books that I have found to provide interesting and varied perspectives on "hacking" in a much broader sense of the word:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael Hiltzick
Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon by Steve Wozniak
You'll probably look at some of these and ask "what does this have to do with hacking?" It's not so much about hacking as it is about what drives people to be curious and creative. Some of these books are pretty old and provide a somewhat unique view on your question. For example, The Cuckoo's Egg was written in 1989 by an astro-physicist working at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, who ends up tracking down a group of international hackers. And of course iWoz provides interesting insights into how a person looks at things and says "I can figure out how to make that work better."
As I said - no clear answer. Enjoy your homework!
Otherwise educated but under/un-employed technical folks used to hack for bragging rights, to prove it could be done, for the thrill of the experience.
Nowadays, hackers become hackers for the money :(
Hacking, in it's current negative connotation, was previously a vehicle for teenagers and young adults to exhibit some form of technical prowess by way of website defacements and data acquisitions. In many cases, it amounted to little more than a form of digital graffiti from those who lacked serious social skills.
There were many motivational factors.
Over the past 5-7 years, however, it has increasingly become a tool of illicit financial gain, and the actors involved are more sophisticated, more organized and in many cases, older than the hacker of the past.
Today, hacking falls into two primary camps: financial gain or so-called "hactivism".
-ASB: http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker
I believe that the foundation for anyone becoming a 'black' anything boils down to their own moral fiber. The will to survive, maybe, but there are millions of extremely intelligent poor people that don't resort to crime to go on. Given equal abilities, there's a difference between a kid who does something mischievous, albeit slightly illegal, and someone who intentionally and with purpose attacks to destroy for hire...and the difference is personal character.
Lauren,
There is also a “White Hat” side to “Hacking” where systems defenses are tested to find vulnerabilities that can be exploited by those with bad intentions “Black Hats.” Often called penetration testing or pen testing.
On the White Hat side the intentions is to fix the issue, on the Black Hat side civil disobedience, profit and pier acknowledgment are often motives.
To take this even further back in time the very first term used in this arena was Cracker.
We mustn't forget that networks existed long before there were computers.
All of this kind of started when John Draper discovered that the prize whistle in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes produced a tone of almost exactly 2600 megahertz.
This tone was the same frequency used by AT&T to terminate long distance call charges but not the call itself. This led to a whole cult who devoted themselves to playing games with the phone system and setting up for profit schemes by routing long distance calls for discounted rates.
The term still 2600 has the love of hackers and phreakers, it is even the name of a related magazine. The 2600 magazine, published quarterly, and it is available on kindle and iPad and has its own twitter group. So I would say it is still alive and well today.
Lauren,
Thanks for the link, to complete it even futher back in time maybe you should add these:
1903 - Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology, sending insulting Morse code messages through the auditorium's projector.
1932
Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki broke the Enigma machine code.
1939
Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen worked together to develop the Bombe (on the basis of Rejewski's works on Bomba). The Enigma machine's use of a reliably small key space, it was vulnerable to the first published security brute force attack.
Adding to the 1965 MIT entry:
William D. Mathews from MIT found a vulnerability in a Multics CTSS running on a IBM 7094. This flaw discloses the contents of the password file. The issue occurred when multiple instances of the system text editor were invoked, causing the editor to create temporary files with a constant name. This would inexplicably cause the contents of the system CTSS password file to display to any user logging into the system.
:-) Scott
Good find Mark,
OK, I'll take the earliest challenge:
The Roman ruler Julius Caesar (100 B.C. – 44 B.C.) used a very simple cipher for secret communication. He substituted each letter of the alphabet with a letter three positions further along. Later, any cipher that used this “displacement” concept for the creation of a cipher alphabet, was referred to as a Caesar cipher. Of all the substitution type ciphers, this Caesar cipher is the simplest to solve, since there are only 25 possible combinations.
The fact the offset was later managed from the initial offset of 1 to a wheel device (this would have required manufacturing and distribution overhead) that could accommodate any offset indicates that it was hacked at some time....We only tend to change something (make it more complex) when it no longer works. It just hit me that Julius Caesar could have made the first cost benefits analysis decision on information security spending… LOL
Had to raise the bar a bit, just 200 decades or so :-)
I wonder what a military strategy historian could add to your timeline...
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