Hack or Crack ?

'For educational purposes' ... that must be about the most widespread excuse for publishing virus creation tools,descriptions of exploits, 'hacking' manuals and the likes. Personally,I don't see much of educational effects in using a Windows application to create a virus
(next >> next >> next >> finish - congratulations, you have created the Ana Kournikova worm)
or following simple instructions to break in to a system - sometimes as simple as
'find a Kazaa user, use your browser to access his PC on TCP port 1214 - you now have access to all his files'.

I also disagree with the motivation / excuses such as 'the right to information - all information - anywhere' or 'I am motivated by curiosity'. I would not like someone to enter my house, go through my drawers and read my papers, letters or whatever. I don't give a damn if this person is doing it 'just to see if it can be done', or to demonstrate the poor quality of my front door lock. There is such a thing as the right to privacy. I don't want a Big Brother government interfering with my personal live, and I don't want just any stranger to do the same, either.

So called 'hackers' -'crackers' would be a more correct term - pride themselves it takes skill, competence, patience, ... to do the things they do, and compare themselves to top athletes. So where's the skill in downloading detailed instructions to exploit a known security hole in Windows? I have a 9 year old nephew who could do that. Granted, the kid is not stupid, but still. How much competence do you need to send someone a trojan by e-mail and hope he'll be stupid enough to run it ? If you really had to stretch your intelligence to its limits to master the complex technique of copy/paste a malicious script into a web page and wait for someone to visit it, that *does* say something about your intelligence. And patiently waiting for the outcome of an extensive port/domain scan is indeed a great accomplishment, especially if you have nothing better to do while the program does all the work. That must require extreme concentration - or very low IQ.

some thoughts on the original meaning of "hacking"

You'll understand that I was rather reluctant to include the following links. But I do. For educational purposes. I, for one,want to know what's going on on the net. And apparently, cracking, spreading viruses, and other 'rebel without a clue' stuff is one of the things going on out there. I also want to know how stuff works. So I will use the 'create your own Ana Kournikova' tool. And then I'll read the vbs file and try to understand what it does. I might even try one or two of these 'exploits' - to better understand networks and data communication. I might attempt to write a password cracker or play around with encryption - to exercise my programming skills or to learn about the mathematics of encryption and how to implement them in a program. One day I might even try to log on to a system that should not allow me to log on - to understand how operating systems handle these things or to see just how easy it is to bypass a username/password login. Or I'll just try to do it on my own system, on my home network,...
Maybe these are just lame excuses as well. The forbidden fruit, boys and toys, to boldly go where no man has gone before, ... It can be tempting.

Papers and Tutorials

Tools

These tools can be used for good and bad. They are all readily available on the Web. So,
if you're one of the good guys : find out how long your passwords will resist a dictionary or brute force attack, see what information your computers would reveal when asked the right way, and check your network before the bad guys do ...