"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

deep in a group of systems, you can't watch everything. Your Bodyguard gets you off as soon
as a sysop signs on, before he even knows you're there. Even if they just log in, you hit the
road. No need to take any chances.''
While the true hacker ethic is not to destroy anything, most young people who find
themselves in a position where it' possible to inflict damage find it hard to resist doing so. As
Troup explains, Most kids will do the most destructive thing they know how to do. There's
nothing in there that they need, or want, or even understand how to use. Everybody's crashed
a system now or then.''
Someone at Troup's end coughs in disagreement and paranoia. David corrects himself.
No need to admit he's ever done anything illegal, now, is there? I'd say 90 percent of
everybody. Everybody's got that urge, you know? `God, I've got full system control--I could
just do a recursive rm [a repeated cycle to begin removing things] and kiss this system
goodbye.' More likely, someone will create a small bug like putting a space before everyone's
password [making it impossible for anyone to log on] and see how long it takes the system
operator to figure it out.'' The passwords will appear correct when the system operator lists
them--except that each one will have a tiny space before it. When the sysop matches the
user's password with the one that the computer says the user should have, the operator won't
notice the extra space before the computer's version.
This is the phony phone call'' to the nth power. Instead of pranking one person on the
other end, the hacker incapacitates a big company run by "nasty suits.'' Hard to resist,
especially when it's a company known to keep tabs on us. The events that frightened Troup
out of hacking for a while concerned just such a company. TRW is the Holy Grail target for
hackers. They're into everything, which is why everyone wants to get into them. They claimed
to be impenetrable, which is half the reason why everyone wants to get in. The more you
look into it, the more security holes they have. They aren't so bad.'' One of Troup's friends in
the background chortles with pride. "It's difficult, because you have to cover your tracks, but
it's not impossible. Just time-consuming,'' Troup explains.
I remember TRW used to have those commercials that just said `TRW, making the
world a better tomorrow.' That's all they did. They were getting us used to seeing them.
Because they were into everything. They sent Tiger Teams [specialized computer commando
squads who establish security protocol in a system] into every system the government has,
either to improve the system's security or to build it in the first place. They have back doors
into everything they've ever worked on. They can assume control over anything they want to.
They're big. They're bad. And they've got more power than they should have, which is why
we were after them. They had Tiger Teams into airport security, aerospace security. And the
government gets software from TRW, upgrades from TRW [also, potentially, with back
doors].
When we got all the way up to the keyhole satellite, we said `That's enough.' We
have really good resources. We have people that can pose as nonpeople--they have Social
Security numbers, tax IDs, everything. But we all got kind of spooked by all this. We had a
continuation of our plan mapped out, but we decided not to go through with it. We ditched all
the TRW stuff we had. I gave it to a friend who buried it underwater somewhere along the
Atlantic shelf. If I tell him to get it back, he will, but if I tell him to get it back using a
slightly different phrase, he will disappear ... for obvious reasons.''
Most purposeful hacking is far less romantic, and done simply to gain access to
systems for their computing power. If someone is working on a complex program or set of
computations, it's more convenient to use some corporation's huge system to carry out the
procedure in a few minutes or hours than to tie up one's own tiny personal computer for days.
The skill comes in getting the work done before the sysop discovers the intrusion. As one
hacker explains to me through an encrypted electronic mail message, They might be on to