Noncryptographic Security Issues - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 383

10.2 Hackers

When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of
winning or losing are equal.

Sun Tzu
(See [279, page 84], as well as page 138 herein.)

What is a Hacker?
Hacker is a term with many meanings. The press has co-opted it to mean
any malicious attacker of a computer system, but those who consider themselves
to be hackers put a different spin on the term. They may see themselves as
computer-savvy individuals who are simply dedicated to pushing the limits of a
computer system for the fulfillment of the exercise (in this section, we will talk
about the pioneers who lived this point of view). Of course, those who consider
themselves to be legitimate hackers might likely consider the individual who
breaks into a computer system (with malicious intent) to be a cracker . However,
the victims really do not care about labels, since damage is done to their system.
The term has changed over time. As far back as the 1920s, it meant an
amateur who played with radios for the purpose of improving its performance,
which may be called hobby hacking . The source of academic hacking is traced to
students at MIT, where a hacker was simply a prankster, and their (technology-
based) pranks or practical jokes, were called “hacks” (we will also talk about
some of this MIT crowd since they form a highly nontrivial intersection with the
aforementioned pioneers). Network hacking began with telephone networks and
involved attempts to get free phone calls by reproducing certain tones into the
telephone receiver. Once computer networks developed, and phone companies
went digital, then network hacking took on a new computer-based meaning.
There are many sides to hacking, and this is given weight in the topic, Cy-
berpunk [116], where three different stories are told from “the dark side” of
hacking to the shy student who wrote a program that brought down a computer
network. The Encyclopedia Britannica looks at hackers as “irresponsible com-
puterphiles”. Perhaps the definition of hacker lies somewhere in the middle of
these various illustrations, but we must settle on a definition for our purposes
that encompasses much of the new-millennium reality. Therefore, for our pur-
poses a hacker will mean an individual who (legally or illegally) gains access
to computer systems, or to software, to either make changes, or to inform the
system administrators of security flaws. This definition encompasses several
acknowledged uses of the term. At the one end, the person who is hired by a
firm to discover security flaws and does this by finding weaknesses in a com-
puter system or piece of software, is sometimes called a white-hat hacker .On
the other end of the spectrum, is the malicious attacker type who breaks into a
system illegally to do significant damage for whatever reason from being a dis-
gruntled employee to just doing it for the perverse joy of the act. In this case,
the hacker is typically called a black-hat hacker . It even encompasses someone in
the middle of these two since there are individuals who gain access to systems
and make insignificant changes, which is done largely for recognition, or just