Hackers are a strange breed. To begin with, there’s really no one central reason why they do what they do. Some are altruistic, some are assholes, and some are just nuts. Others, well, who knows why they do what they do, other than the thought of trying to do something that others think can’t be done.
Recently, a group of hackers, the Lulz crowd, have decided to hack for the sake of hacking. I don’t know what their rationale is, although there is a sense that they have some kind of foundation behind what they do, as they vowed to protect Sega because of its business practices, while going after pretty much everything else. However, for the common person who is just using the Internet for the simple purpose of exploring all there is to offer, hackers are making the Internet a less attractive place than it was only weeks before.
Recently, they went through antics of hacking some database and then posting the passwords of people all over the Internet. What purpose does this serve, other than to show that passwords can be broken, and that people generally don’t choose the greatest passwords. Well, to be honest, most people don’t seem to be password protecting stuff that is critical or crucial. They’re password protecting a message board that forced them to create a password, and to be honest, when you have to keep making passwords for everything you access, you tend to get lazy and choose very simple to remember things. That’s where “Omega” becomes an option for a password instead of H78j738gckzh9peK>L;c. Yeah, that last one might be a lot harder to crack, but let’s be honest here. Most of the hacking that has been done has been because a database was broken into (one that most people don’t have the password to anyway), so that their passwords, which could be the greatest password EVER created, are automatically given to the hacker. So, it doesn’t matter how well you come up with a great password. If the infrastructure that you use the password on is stupid, so then is your password.
What has been happening is that these people are using their skills as cracking codes and making life miserable for common people, just for the sake of showing it could be done. I’ll let you in on a not very well kept secret. I’m an expert at killing people. Got trained by the Army and everything. But that doesn’t mean that I spent my free time hunting down people and killing them in order to show others how easy it is for me to do. There is some point where the common sense in people should show through, and with hackers the lack of restraint has made that almost impossible.
To make it worse, hackers are now to the point where any thought used against them automatically results in a group of hackers targeting someone who has nothing to do with them. Some years back, I was an opinion editor of a newspaper. When we ran an opinion column that made a couple of stupid arguments against moped riders, a group of glorified moped riders started point of service attacks on the newspaper and then on my own personal account. Rather than engage in conversation with other people, they took it upon themselves to attack people who disagreed with them. It actually took a member of their group to call for sanity before the attacks stopped.
This is the mentality of the hackers today. And they’re making it so that people don’t trust the networks with whom they do business. Right now, I have no desire to turn on my Playstation 3 and deal with Sony, mainly because I can’t trust Sony to stop hackers from stealing my personal information. I don’t blame Sony, but at the same time, I find it foolish to trust their network. This is an easy way to create a chilling effect on entire industries, as I also don’t trust a lot of other technology companies with whom I might have also wanted to do business, because this anarchic approach to business has made it so that I just don’t want to waste my time having to deal with the ramifications of stupid, evil people.
I find hackers to be one step below the screamer in a press conference who wants to shout down everyone who disagrees with him. The reason I put it one step below is that at least the screamer has a reason he’s doing what he’s doing, that’s not as simple as yelling just to stop people from being heard. A hacker, in this context, is a screamer who yells for no reason, wanting ONLY to make sure that no one can be heard and then demanding credit for being the one who yelled the loudest.
Unfortunately, businesses have almost no way to counter this type of behavior, which means that fewer and fewer of them are going to risk the chance of being destroyed by some malicious individual who only wants to create destruction in his path. They’re a lot like spammers who sent out millions of emails for the sole purpose of trying to scam one individual out of hard-earned savings.
For awhile, I was on the fence about hackers, especially when they worked to undermine oppressive regimes like Iran and China. But when they then turned their talents on the average person for no reason other than to see if they could do it, I stopped being a potential fan. I’ve seen too many good people who have been seriously hurt by people who thought it would be fun to disrupt the status quo.
You see a lot of this in online gaming communities these days. Some games have been completely obliterated by this attitudinal attack. They’ve even started to go after some of the biggies, like Eve Online. Why? Because they can. No other reason than that. Someone tried to make an obscure connection of a link to Sony, but even that was really weak. It looked like they attacked Eve Online just because it was there. And that’s pretty sad.
Unfortunately, I believe the problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets–no, actually, I don’t believe it’s going to get any better. As long as they remain anonymous, they can take the cowardly route of attacking people behind masks. And that’s been the problem with the Internet since the beginning. What was its one fundamental strong point, its anonymity, has also been its weakest as well. From Internet chatroom fights with flame wars started by anonymous big mouths to where we are today, as long as this element continues to dominate the field, it might bring about the demise of the usefulness of the Internet itself.
And that would be truly sad.