"Hugo Cornwall "The Hacker's handbook"" - читать интересную книгу автора

knowledge. Up to a point, each chapter may be read by itself; I have
compiled extensive appendices, containing material which will be of
use long after the main body of the text has been absorbed.
It is one of the characteristics of hacking anecdotes, like those
relating to espionage exploits, that almost no one closely involved
has much stake in the truth; victims want to describe damage as
minimal, and perpetrators like to paint themselves as heroes while
carefully disguising sources and methods. In addition, journalists
who cover such stories are not always sufficiently competent to write
accurately, or even to know when they are being hoodwink- ed. (A note
for journalists: any hacker who offers to break into a system on
demand is conning you--the most you can expect is a repeat
performance for your benefit of what a hacker has previously
succeeded in doing. Getting to the 'front page' of a service or
network need not imply that everything within that service can be
accessed. Being able to retrieve confidential information, perhaps
credit ratings, does not mean that the hacker would also be able to
alter that data. Remember the first rule of good reporting: be
sceptical.) So far as possible, I have tried to verify each story
that appears in these pages, but hackers work in isolated groups and
my sources on some of the important hacks of recent years are more
remote than I would have liked. In these
cases, my accounts are of events and methods which, in all the
circumstances, I believe are true. I welcome notes of correction.
Experienced hackers may identify one or two curious gaps in the
range of coverage, or less than full explanations; you can chose any
combination of the following explanations without causing me any
worry: first, I may be ignorant and incompetent; second, much of the
fun of hacking is making your own discoveries and I wouldn't want to
spoil that; third, maybe there are a few areas which are really best
left alone.
Nearly all of the material is applicable to readers in all
countries; however, the author is British and so are most of his
experiences.
The pleasures of hacking are possible at almost any level of
computer competence beyond rank beginner and with quite minimal
equipment. It is quite difficult to describe the joy of using the
world's cheapest micro, some clever firmware, a home-brew acoustic
coupler and find that, courtesy of a friendly remote PDP11/70, you
can be playing with Unix, the fashionable multitasking operating
system.
The assumptions I have made about you as a reader are that you own a
modest personal computer, a modem and some communications software
which you know, roughly, how to use. (If you are not confident yet,
practise logging on to a few hobbyist bulletin boards.) For more
advanced hacking, better equipment helps; but, just as very tasty
photographs can be taken with snap-shot cameras, the computer
equivalent of a Hasselblad with a trolley- load of accessories is not
essential.
Since you may at this point be suspicious that I have vast