Armchair Hacker
Categories: Nonfiction
Like betting on horses and selling worthless junk on eBay, computer hacking and its precurser, phone phreaking, are a lot harder to do now than they used to be. The coolness of knowing that you can make free phone calls by calling an 800 number, blowing your Captain Crunch whistle into the receiver before anyone picks up, and then "dialing" the person you really wanted to call, has become much less cool now that
- Long-distance phone calls are now pretty much free if you have a cell phone (even free-er if you borrow someone else's phone); and
- Now that everything's digital, the Captain Crunch trick doesn't work anymore.
The library has a lot of how-to books of hacking computers, none of them helpful to a person like me who can't even set up a static IP address on her home computer. You won't find instructions like, "To learn your ex-husband's Hotmail password, just solder an unbent coathanger to any USB port and hit the Control Key three times." You'll probably want to know a computer language like C or C++ to really use a book like Hacking Exposed: Web Applications--and have a specific interest in government or industrial espionage. A similar book, The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking, written in 2001 by the then 16-year-old Ankit Fadia, devotes over 100 pages to the Nasty Scripts and Hostile Applets chapter--just so you'll recognize one if you come across it.
Hacking, in general, is not considered eithical and is sometimes performed by creepy loners. But not usually, because it helps to be good at social engineering. According to The Hacking of America: Who's Doing It, Why, and How, hackers usually have close online social networks although not particularly loyal ones: hackers are often willing to grass each other out in exchange for lighter sentences. To spot a hacker, according to this book, look for interests in music, chess, backgammon, war games, ham radio, linguistics, and theater.
If you eat out with people, beware if they order "ethnic, spicy, Oriental, exotic, and high-quality Jewish delicatessen food," because they're probably going to try to get your passwords. If you see someone engaging in "bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, and skating," well, just run the other way. (Especially from the auto racing, which is also probably illegal.)
If you have a specific project in mind (e.g. piggybacking your neighbor's WiFi after your power is shut off) the Internet is probably your best bet. (You'll need to plan for this before your power is shut off.)
Still, like being stranded in the Andes after a horrible plane crash, hacking might be more fun to read about than actually to attempt. Tangled Web: Tales of Digital Crime from the Shadows of Cyberspace, and The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers both tell the stories of people who have hacked into electronic equipment out of greed or for other reasons. The stories are satisfying, because the hackers are all awfully smart people whom under normal circumstances I might envy. For example, I don't think I would realize that the numbers on casino slot machines are not really random, hide a tiny computer in a transister radio in my pocket, run a wire down my pant leg, and manipulate the slot-machine-controlling computer with a string tied to my big toe. But unlike me, these people now have prison records.
In the meantime, just call me if you'd like a soldering iron and a couple of rolls of solder.
