3. The Adversary of Cybersecurity: Hackers 55 ed by political or ideological reasons, it can be important for the hackers to be able to take credit for the harm they caused. 3.1.2.3 Hacking for Curiosity, Fun, and Bragging Rights “ELK CLONER: / THE PROGRAM WITH A PERSONALITY / IT WILL GET ON ALL YOUR DISKS / IT WILL INFILTRATE YOUR CHIPS / YES IT’S CLONER! / IT WILL STICK TO YOU LIKE GLUE / IT WILL MODIFY RAM TOO / SEND IN THE CLONER!” - Elk Cloner virus poem Other motivations for hacking are simply curiosity, fun, and bragging rights. When curiosity is unchecked, it can result in illegal hacking. This category of hacking is known as nuisance hacking. Despite the name, the effects can be damaging beyond causing a mere nuisance. Many nuisance hackers do not believe they are doing anything wrong due to immaturity or lack of a moral compass. They might even blame the victims for being sloppy and inviting an attack. Some students are susceptible to the allure of nuisance hacking. Unfortunately for them, it is illegal and can result in expulsion from school and even criminal prosecution. Some people hack for the joy of it. Their motivation is to have fun and see if they can accomplish a personal goal. They may be trying to boost their street cred by collecting trophies. They likely brag to their friends about their hacking exploits. A specific example is website defacing. Website defacing is in cyberspace what spray painting graffiti on a building is in physical space. In a website defacing attack, a website is taken over and replaced with a defaced version or a new webpage promoting the hacker. Hacktivists engage in website defacing to embarrass victims and promote their cause. Many of the earliest hackers fell into the category of nuisance hacking. They were not hacking to make money. Rather, they were just trying to pull pranks and test the limits of what they could accomplish. Sometimes their hacking exploits resulted in silly annoyances. The Elk Cloner virus was one of the first viruses ever created. It was created as a prank by a fifteen year old named Rich Skrenta in 1982, during the early era of personal computers. When it infected systems, it would randomly pop up a poem on the victim’s computer. Other examples of nuisance hacking can be much more damaging, like other early computer viruses that erased all of the files on the victim’s machine. Phone phreakers are another category of early nuisance hackers. Phone phreaking was an early form of nuisance hacking that exploited vulnerabilities in the landline, and later cellular, telephone system. It could be argued that they did benefit monetarily because they made phone calls for free. Kevin Poulsen allegedly hacked the phone system to win multiple radio “9th caller” competitions and later went on to become a journalist and author. So while there were financial benefits, mostly phone phreakers were motivated by curiosity and bragging rights.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=