Analog5:002 Article 005

Rant

By: gameman73
Published: March 20th, 2007

The Internet has come a long way, although it may not have been for the best. It has seemingly gone from being a research/educational tool, to being used as a weapon and for profit by many people. Governments, corporations, and individual people have taken advantage of the trusting nature of the internet and has turned it into something that people dread to explore. I'm not an "old-timer" reminiscing on old days (been on the internet since 2000ish), but one look at some of the more basic features of the internet will tell you it wasn't designed to withstand the stress we put on it. Take a look at POP3. Our beloved e-mail protocol has been around since 1996*, yet is still in use today. Our e-mail is flying around the Internet without mandatory encryption (by default is my *GUESS*, however POP3 CAN be run with encryption). With simple software programs, it is dead easy to sniff out passwords from wireless and wired networks alike.

Now to set this back on course. By default, the internet has gotten to be an insecure place. However, there are people who have chosen to capitalize on this instead of helping the problem. It has gotten to be necessary to use a firewall of some type. One could argue that it's stupid not to put a firewall on your computer, but why is that? Someone on the other end might own it? That's a good point, but as far as I know, its still illegal in most countries to intrude into others' networks, yet it happens day in and day out. In this day and age, with thousands upon thousands of people using computers, it has gotten easier and easier to "own" machines, and yet there are still people who believe that it is "cool" to infect hundreds or thousands of computers for nothing more than their personal enjoyment. Spammers flood the internet with their junk, in hopes of snagging a few people to actually click on their message, which usually gets sent to junk filters. Or, they may get hand deleted, causing thousands if not millions of man-hours to be wasted. And lets not even mention the bandwith they waste. Spyware/malware vendors focus on new ways to embed their junk into the most obscure parts of windows causing most people to pay for specialized services to get rid of it. Usually costing them anywhere between $80 to $120 or more, plus the possibility of data loss (if a format is deemed necessary). NONE of this is hacking, this is exploiting.

So I suppose my point is who is to blame for this? Do we blame the simple people who just want their computer to work? Or do be blame the people who make this possible? Or how about the people who ACTUALLY do this and think there is something to gain out of it? Or we could blame the people in charge of making the decisions that lead to the security holes that allow these to happen? Personally, I blame the people who use this maliciously. I think Foxx from BSoD put it very nicely when he said "Hacking is the exploration of a system." While I don't agree with everything he has said, this makes sense. While exploring, you can look, poke, and do various things. However, exploring is not exploiting. Exploiting vulnerabilities only makes you a "cracker" (in the evil hacker sense), and with the internet being designed to be a trusting place, that isn't a hard thing to do.

When it comes to "white hat" "grey hat" or "black hat", the only real choice when "hacking" in the traditional sense is white hat, or grey hat if it's important information or the company isn't doing anything. Grey hat does NOT mean make your own virus botnet to really show this company. Do the responsible thing and post it somewhere where everyone can see and for it to gain attention. Software bugs won't be going away any time soon, so if you expect the situation to get better any time soon, think again. Unfortunately for every 10 people with ethics or morals, theres 100 or more people willing to exploit it for their own gain. The only viable solution in my opinion is tougher enforcement of pre-existing laws or convincing the main offenders that they need to back off. Right now, the internet is in a position where no one person or country can control it. Unfortunately, other than attempting to solve the problems one by one, only to have them be broke again (in a similar fashion to drm), there doesn't seem to be a real solution.

• POP3 RFC located at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1939

Mad props to manuel and Moonlit for proofreading. Thanks guys.

-gameman73