A short commentary on script kiddies.
By: Anateus
Recently, the number of worms and virii unleashed unto the unsuspecting computers of housewives using AOL, uneducated students and clueless businessmen. This plague has also hit the security community hard in the soft spot. As the worms spread by millions the security companies stood besides, watching, unable to act fast enough. The damages were awesome and everyone suffered. Who were the cause of these great crises? Probably some l33t evil super-hacker or some programmer which lost control over his creation, right? Wrong! These virii and worms that amount to billions of dollars in costs, were mostly created by people between 13 to 25.
Downloading some code from a hax0r website, getting another hax0r code editing tutorial, and voila! You have a worm that will devastate thousands and cost millions of dollars. Who are these aspiring hax0rs? How did they come to be? The easy answer: blame society. However, paranoia is to blame.
Today’s youth should be empowered with knowledge and information, when they are forcefully shut out they try to break in through the back door. The education system’s paranoia of students getting into data record hampers technological advancements at school and the technological advancements of the students.
Instead of education young minds about piracy, computer security, and related technological issues the “System” shuts them out, trying to prevent any knowledge about *gasp* hacking, getting to the students. So these information deprived youths that have some kind of potential accidentally, or not so accidentally, stumble over some this o that hax0r site, and oh my goodness! They find information about the dark secrets and black magic being withheld from them. Now, they don’t know about the ethics many hackers hold, they just found some cool way to crash someone’s computer, and because it’s so forbidden it arises their curiosity.
However, instead of looking into the matter and researching deeply evolving into a “newbie” and maybe later into a “hacker” they choose the dark side, these newly born “script kiddies” devastate the net, and in turn build some more “hax0r” sites to create more script kiddies until their ISP kicks them. Now that we covered the problem, what is the solution? Returning to the basis of close future society, evolving right now, information.
Everyone, with no exception should have equal access to information. I am not speaking of access to private sensitive records I mean free libraries, computer and otherwise. Programs should NOT be pirated; however, the source code for them should be available. Thus, there would be no yearning for breaking the laws because those who will not become professional information thieves but still have the same level of power will develop a firm sense of ethics as many hackers have now.
Thus, the cliché “Knowledge is power” will become quite true, and today’s hackers will be leading the way into the new dawn of the Information Age society.
1.) Old Posts don't die -- they get archived - Dinesh Nair
2.) Flawed Internal Setups By Example - presto
3.) An Interview with the Father of the Internet - L33tdawg
4.) Exploiting Weaknesses In Intrusion Detection Systems - spoonfork
5.) Snort for idiots (and cheap people like me) - presto
6.) A short commentary on script kiddies - Anateus
7.) SOTHA Returns! - madsaxon
8.) Cold Fusion Server Security - madirish
