Who Are Hackers, Anyway?
The computer underground says that it is misunderstood
Hacker. The very word conjures up images of nihilistic teenagers hellbent on destruction--of reckless, restive nerds just one keystroke away from starting World War III. To hear the hackers themselves tell it, however, nothing could be further from the truth.QQTrue, there are bad-seed "crackers" among their ranks. But members of the computer underground dismiss the negative stereotypes as the lies of a pandering media. Instead, they claim that true hackers are interested not in destruction but in technology, and that they circumvent security only to help improve it. "People say hackers want to destroy networks," says "mosthated," who was rousted by the FBI over Memorial Day weekend. "But most people do it for knowledge. It's for the fun."QQIn his own hacking career, mosthated claims to have carefully followed the community's famed ethic, which frowns upon needless defacements and network trashing. Instead, he leaves notes for system administrators, detailing their holes. "We broke into a site the summer of last year, and I left my E-mail address," he says. "I helped the system administrator set up some mail servers."QQNo malicious intent. As a rule, hackers don't like crackers. In fact, the group that recently defaced the White House Web page has been castigated by many peers. Mike McCloskey of Klein Associates, a research firm that has been commissioned by the U.S. military to study the psychology of hackers, concurs that most hackers lack malicious intent. "They have an inherent interest in technology," he says. They are also motivated by ideals. "They don't like the idea that information is private," adds Terry Stanard, also of Klein Associates, echoing a crucial mantra of the underground: "Information wants to be free."QQBut the temptation to play King of the Cybermountain sometimes pushes people to cross the blurry boundary between hacker and cracker. "A lot of what they do is to get the attention of the press or to get the attention of their peer group," continues Stanard. "It's almost like a popularity contest that you encounter in grade school." If that means taking down a heavy-traffic site and posting profanity-laced diatribes, or downloading files from NASA, so be it.QQThere is certainly a rush associated with infiltrating sites and servers. "It's sort of an addictive thing," says McCloskey. "You can hack into a high-level site and put in a back door, and you get more and more access." That addiction can become all encompassing for some. "LoopHole," another target of the FBI raids, knows of many who become hopelessly obsessed, dedicating every hour of every day to the pursuit of access. "That's all they do," says LoopHole, who claims membership in the underground group "Hydro hoax programmers."QQA number of hackers underachieve in school, something they often blame on curricula that don't cater to their unique interests. "A lot of people drop out, 'cause there's really nothing you can learn in school," says mosthated, a dropout himself. "At my school, they only had two computer classes, and one was learning databases."QQBy the time they reach adulthood, many hackers fantasize about going legit, turning their years of practice into healthy salaries as systems administrators or security advisers. Mosthated, for example, has a job offer, the chance to do remote security for a small Internet service provider in Denver; he's also got his heart set on designing his own network with the aid of a programmer in Belgium.QQOf course, not all hackers end up in corporate cubicles. Tempted by businesses offering cash in exchange for stolen information, some of them are going over to the dark side. "There are people out there who do hacking for hire," admits mosthated, who says everyone on the Internet is talking about a few individuals who have offered big bucks in exchange for proprietary secrets.QQYet financial gain is rarely on the mind of hackers, many of whom are too young to dream of purchasing anything grander than a compact disk. Boredom is the enemy, and in the era of the two-computer family, hacking is the answer. "A lot of these kids are 14, 15, 16 years old," says Mike Hudack, editor of Aviary-mag.com. "They don't have anything else to do." To the companies whose sites get trashed in the course of curing that boredom, however, "harmless" and "hacker" are mutually exclusive terms.
This story appears in the June 14, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
