Introduction To Hacking

Defining hacker:

Traditionally, a hacker is someone who likes to tinker with software orelectronic systems. Hackers enjoy exploring and learning how computersystems operate. They love discovering new ways to work electronically.

2000-now Today’s hacking

An increase in the use of the Internet, e-mail and telephony meant a natural increase in hacking activity. New eldsof interest have opened itself up, such as VOIP, Bluetooth mobile phones, etc. The rest of this guide will focus onmodern hacking techniques mostly, so read on if you want to know more.

Well known hackers

• Richard Stallman (born March 16, 1953)

Regarded as the most inuential person in the open source community, Richard MatthewStallman is the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. Richardwas also one of the AI programmers at MIT of which i spoke in the previous paragraph.
Today he is probably one of the most active activists in the eld of free software, and hasreceived numerous honorary doctorates and professorships

• Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957)

Not a hacker in the hollywood kind of way, but a real open source guru and computerspecialist in general. Was rst active in the hacking scene in the late 70′s, and is responsiblefor many lines of open source software. Within the hacker culture though, he is most knownfor his adoption of the Jargon File, a glossary of hacker slang.

Furthermore he wrote a lot of documentation and how-to’s, mainly for linux programsand distrubutions. In 2003 he wrote the book The Art of Unix Programming’, and atthe moment of writing this guide he is a high-prole representative for the Open Source community.

• Kevin Mitnick (born October 6, 1963)

Probably the most famous hacker out there for the main public, also the rst person toserve time in prison for committing computercrimes, ve years in total. He started hackingat 12 years old, using social engineering. In high school he picked up phreaking, and soonwas notorious in the phreaking scene.Now, in 2007, Kevin is a professional security consultant with Mitnick Security Consulting,LLC. He also co-authored a few books on computer security and social engineering

• Gary McKinnon (born 1966, exact date unknown)

A British hacker that is accused of hacking into NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Depart-ment of Defense and the US Air Force. Was arrested in 2002 by the British NationalHi-Tech Crime Unit, and was later banned from using any computer with internet access.
Although he might sound like a real bad-ass blackhat hacker, he later admitted that hewas simply using scripts looking for blank/default passwords, which gave him access tothe systems listed above. Technically this makes him a scriptkiddie, who just got a lot ofmedia attention.