Hacker Secrets

As the nights finally start to draw in,  Jonni Bidwell dons his black hoody  and stares into the terminal. Actually,  he’s been doing this all summer long…

The infinitive ‘to hack’ has been co-opted by popular media as the act of illicitly gaining access to systems and exploiting them, either for personal gain or just for entertainment (lulz). However, the original hackers were just enthusiasts interested in making and meddling with technology in order to make things behave in new and novel ways.

Many programmers and makers will happily refer to their day-to-day activities as hacking, but they’d probably use a different word if they were talking to, say, someone at border control. So do forgive us if we’re leaning more toward the media’s definition here. We just really liked the 1995 movie starring Jonny Lee Miller. And also the inspiring story of astronomer Clifford Stoll, who in 1986 almost single-handedly tracked down a hacker who was selling information to the KGB.

Nefarious, “black hat” hackers or cyber criminals are a scourge on society, but the tricks and tools they use can be used for good. Indeed “white hat” hackers and penetration testers make an honest living from doing almost the same thing as their miscreant counterparts. Though they tend to stop short of exfiltrating funds, deleting data or defacing public web pages.

Knowing the techniques behind these attacks helps us defend against them. Knowing the vulnerabilities they exploit helps us build more secure programs. And knowing that breaking into systems without permission is illegal will hopefully help keep you out of jail. There’s nothing in this feature that you won’t find (albeit without such linguistic flair) on the interwebs, but stick to exploiting your own machines. We don’t tell you anything about covering your tracks in this feature, after all.

What do hackers want?

A rooted box is a useful thing to have around the home, so let’s start by looking at how it got that way and what can be done with it.