Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 219 pages
- Published by: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
- Edition: 1st Edition March 26, 2002
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0072223642
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0072223644
-
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
- Weighs: 1.1 pounds
Product Description
To many who knew him, there was nothing odd about him. He was a normal kidOn February 7, 2000, Yahoo.com was the first victim of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever to hit the Internet. On May 8
th, Buy.com was battling a massive denial-of-service attack. Later that afternoon, eBay.com also reported significant outages of service, as did Amazon.com. Then CNN's global online news operation started to grind to a crawl. By the following day, Datek and E-Trade entered crisis modeall thanks to an ordinary fourteen-year-old kid.
Friends and neighbors were shocked to learn that the skinny, dark-haired, boy next door who loved playing basketball--almost as much as he loved computers--would cause millions of dollars worth of damage on the Internet and capture the attention of the online world--and the federal government. He was known online as "Mafiaboy" and, to the FBI, as the most notorious teenage hacker of all time. He did it all from his bedroom PC. And he's not alone.
Computer hacking and Web site defacement has become a national pastime for America's teenagers, and according to the stories you'll read about in
The Hacker Diaries--it is only the beginning. But who exactly are these kids and what motivates a hacker to strike? Why do average teenagers get involved in hacking in the first place? This compelling and revealing book sets out to answer these questions--and some of the answers will surprise you. Through fascinating interviews with FBI agents, criminal psychologists, law-enforcement officials--as well as current and former hackers--you'll get a glimpse inside the mind of today's teenage hacker. Learn how they think, find out what it was like for them growing up, and understand the internal and external pressures that pushed them deeper and deeper into the hacker underground. Every hacker has a life and story of his or her own. One teenager's insatiable curiosity as to how the family's VCR worked was enough to trigger a career of cracking into computer systems. This is a remarkable story of technological wizardry, creativity, dedication, youthful angst, frustration and disconnection from society, boredom, anger, and jail time. Teenage hackers are not all indifferent punks. They're just like every other kid and some of them probably live in your neighborhood. They're there. All you have to do is look.
Book Info
An insightful book that gives you a glimpse inside the mind of today's teenage hacker. Learn how they think, find out what it was like for them growing up, and understand the internal and external pressures that pushed them deeper and deeper int the hacker background.
Reader Reviews"The Hacker Diaries" (THD) will make veterans of the security scene smile and wince. Smiles come from learning the personalities and quirks of the book's teenage subjects. Winces result from the perceptions of these teenage wizards' "skilz" and motivations, and the author's own awkward handling of technical concepts. THD is probably worth buying once it is republished in a cheaper paperback format, or borrowed from your local library. THD suffers in parts from the author's unfamiliarity with his subject material. "X Windows" is not quite "an emulator that offers users the familiar Windows interface" (p. 11). John Vranesevich is not "thought to be one of the best hackers in the world" (p. 207). (Boy, that was funny.) While a couple guys from the "Cult of the Dead Cow" were also members of "L0pht," cDc did not become the @Stake company (p. 208). The Navy "SHADOW" paper of 1998 mostly discovered benign network traffic, not "highly coordinated scans" (p. 169). (Others fell for this explanation, though.) Comments about Fairbanks, Alaska's "treeless tundra landscapes" aside, the author clearly did a lot of research and work on this book. He presents his teenage hacker subjects in clear and captivating prose. He covers some of the more intriguing security events of the past few years, such as Bill Swallow's undercover work tracking the Serbian underground and revealing Mafiaboy's involvement in DDoS attacks. Verton captured the essence of H.D. Moore with histhat "he had the unique ability to speak as quickly as his mind processed his thoughts." Like Rick Fleming, when I last spoke with H.D. Moore in San Antonio, I also "strained to listen." THD deserves a high three-star rating, but I couldn't rate it as highly as some of the four-star books I've read recently. Incidentally, although the author didn't include his own web site in the book's appendices, it's worth a visit. Maybe next time Verton will direct his considerable energy towards tackling the real sources of danger on the net: organized crime, foreign intelligence sources, and disgruntled insiders?
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