Underground

A few days back I had discovered over at adamo's site a link to the online version of the book "Underground". I downloaded the book (of course choosing the plain text version - update: the old link lead to a scam site) and started reading. Kept me hooked busy for a few days of intensive reading. The book recounts the days of old, when teenagers dialed their modems into BBS's and later learned to "hack" (which in this context means to break into other people's computers). I enjoyed the book and it ignited some good thoughts...

Part of the reading reminded me of when I started out with home computers (even though most of the book is set slightly later), and some of the people seem a bit familiar. Mind that I've never been into that scene myself.

At the time when I was reading the book, I was heavy into real hacking, meaning I was programming and fixing bugs on Zwiki code. While *that* meaning of "hacking" is an activity with very prudent background, the intensity and concentration on the task is similar. Following hot on the scent of some bug through various layers of code seemed to be very similar to the description of the kids going through various layers of security in host systems and networks.

Another note in the book rang a bell: Next Sunday I will be giving my PGP talk. The book is full of examples where the "hackers" broke into computers and the very first thing they do is to read the system administrators mail: Looking for mentions of break-ins or break-in attempts, looking for passwords and information to get into other systems. Had those system administrators used PGP for their mail, the kids breaking in would have had much more trouble. The one example where encryption was used to protect a file posed a major problem to the intruders -- even though it was the very low-grade "crypt" encryption program.