Here's how a great deal of hacking works: people write programs or scripts that tell a computer to guess password and user name combinations at prompts. A computer can guess a lot faster than an average person can type, up to a few billion guesses every second.
Eventually, the guessing computer will get the password right, if given enough time. Fortunately, complex passwords take a lot of time to guess.
We live in a modern age, where free and easily downloaded firewalls, anti-viruses and anti-spyware programs can render 99% of all hacking attempts obsolete. But somethings, probably considered hacks, are still all too easy to learn and use.
For instance, this article details how to crash interwebs explorer. There, Now you know how to hack. You can't turn me in now, you're in too deep already!
The history of hacking is a wide and varied one, taking place all over the world. Feel free to peruse the map below, showing the locations of some of the biggest hacking events in interwebs history.
View Blog Map in a larger map
And I totally lied about penguin hackers.
Diving Deeper -
http://www.sptimes.com/Hackers/history.hacking.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_hacker_history
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/misc/hack/index.htm
http://www.crime-research.org/library/crime1.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021902643.html?hpid=moreheadlines
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1670
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/08/02/british.hacker.mckinnon/index.html
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/japanese-hacker-arrests-doubled-in-2007-20081111/
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate
3 comments:
Hacking is fascinating to me but totally frightening as well. With the advent of social media and the fact that the lower end of age of users gets younger and younger daily, hacking is becoming a huge problem. I've recently been getting a lot of spam through direct messaging on Twitter from people's accounts that are getting hacked. I literally just changed my passwords last week to more complex number/word combinations to prevent this from happening to me!
One of my favorite movies is called Shattered Glass, about a reporter named Stephen Glass who completely makes up a whole boat load of stories. One of them was about a kid hacker, and a hacker conference. Very interesting to be able to read into what the subject of hacking really and truly is!
I just read the article you linked to about the kid hacking his way onto Time's list of "The World's Most Influential People", pretty humorous/wild stuff.
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