Is there any possibility of a hackers code of ethics?

I must have jinxed myself by saying lots more long drives in the previous blog entry. As it turns out, I may just have to head back to DC in order to rebuild a few servers. Why? Because some person who seems to lack the good sense of applying their intelligence for the right purposes decided to hack my servers.

Recently, David Coursey, the Executive Editor of ZDNet’s Anchordesk, wrote a column entitled: The only fitting punishment for virus writers? Death!. Today, I think I know exactly where David was coming from when he wrote that! I spent all morning trying to track down an intruder whose antics had successfully crippled one of my crtitical servers. Still going actually, just waiting for some installation files to get transferred over to the datacenter before I return to conducting my autopsy of the hack-attack to assess the level of damage. So far, the resonating piece of advice I’ve received from CERT and all the people who I’ve spoken to is, wipe the machine and start over. I agree that that’s the best thing to do, and that’s what I’l probably have to do… but what a freaking waste of time and effort just because some idiot feel like they have the right to come mess with other people’s systems!

Now, I’ll admit that I’ve done my share of hacking for fun. I was never a serious hacker, but I knew enough to be dangerous. But all the hacking I did was never done with any malicious intentions and was generally limited to learning new tricks without causing any damage to anyone. The hacker mentality is one of someone who needs a challenge. I most cases, there isn’t really any real work or value that the hacker intends to derive from compromising your systems, but instead, it’s just a thrill, a rush… that I am smarter than the other person because I broke into their machine! From that point of view, I would actually consider hackers to be lower on the scale of “the scum of the earth” than someone who commits burglaries, steals or mugs people. At least in those cases they get something out of it!!

Even in hacking there can be some level or ethics and morals can there not? You want a challenge? You want to prove how smart you are? Then do it in a fucking constructive way. If you can’t find a constructive way and you still really want to hack, then go ahead, hack away, but do it so you can alert the person who’s system you’ve hacked to let them know that there is a hole in their system they need to plug!! Trust me a lot more people will recognize and appreciate what you do when you do it in such a way that it helps them than harms them! If your reason for hacking is because you want a kick out it, it’s a bigger kick to help someone and have them thank you then to screw up something they’ve spent time and effort working on!

What most hackers do these days is akin to the street-vandals who go around defacing other people’s property. How would you feel like if someone came in and spray painted your car huh?? That’s what you’re doing everyday that you go treading on other people’s work and effort as you go ssh’ing, rlogin’ing, telnett’ing and su’ing from machine to machine. So develop some request for things which do not belong to you! If you want computing power, then get it the right way! Check out projects like United Devices and SETI@Home. Build your own network. Learn how to channel your intelligence in a way that you can actually get something more back from it than just the hollow thrill of patting your own back!

Well, enough ranting on Hackers, Script Kiddies and Virus writers. I left a message for the hacker who broke into my system by modifying /etc/motd. It reads:

Dear Mr. hacker:

Why the heck are you screwing with our systems?

We’d really appreciate it if you would leave them alone

and restore all the files that you messed with.

How’s that for a straightforward request? 🙂

If you need to contact us, email <address suppressed>

regards,

-m

Let’s see if he or she has the good sense to either just go away, have the courage and the decency to actually respond to it openly and explain himself or herself or if this is just another person content to be part of the scum of the Internet…

I’m currently reading a book titled Everyday Irrationality : How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally on the recommendation of a friend. The author Robyn M. Dawes is a professor at Carnegie Mellon. As I would hope and expected, the book makes one question the basic assumptions of human behavior to identify the places where we are being irrational. Right up my alley. Somewhat academic (understandably so!) but still very interesting stuff nonetheless.

So as a result of reading this book and another one of my daily experiences, I started thinking this evening about how ego plays a role in irrational decisions. This is specifically in reference to a previous blog (okay, this sucks, the way my archives are setup using frames right now, I cannot link directly to a blog entry. That is unacceptable and so I’ll have to change that soon, till then, you’ll just have to find it in the archives yourself) titled Fear, Regret and Hope. In that blog I wrote about how IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) fear of the consequences often prevents us from taking an action and if we succumb to that fear, what we land up with is regret. Today’s hypothesis based on my own experience is that the fear is primarily that of getting a bruised ego. The fear of rejection. The fear of failure. The fear of looking like a complete idiot — what’s that saying… It’s better to keep you mouth shut and have people think you are a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt!.

So ego plays a huge role. Often to the extent that because of it… or better yet, because of the fear of getting a bruised ego, we choose to not take a chance, which if analyzed could be an irrational decision. Well, I’m not sure about that.. because does a bruised ego count as a possible negative outcome? How do you quantify the effect of that?

Anyhow, the bottomline is that I feel a little hypocritical, because though I can sit here and write about this stuff and analyze my own actions, it is definitely a lot harder to embody the ideas everytime, all the time, in all situations. I guess I’m still too self-conscious in some cases and still need to train myself better 🙂 There is always room for improvement. It’s the largest room in the house.

:note to self. sbux aim