Hacking Is Necessary For This World
Ethical hacking is absolutely a real thing and hackers are necessary to this new world of technology and the cyber security safety of major companies and even private citizens. Catherine Bracy talks about hackers being a force for the good just as much as evil in her TED Talk in September of 2013 as shown to the left.
Citizens like Khalil Shreateh are a very real testament of this. Khalil, a self taught coder, is from a small village in Palestine and cracked through Facebook’s firewalls and discovered a very major security flaw in the huge social media network that would enable anyone to post anything on anyone else’s wall. And although he took this discovery to Facebook’s security team they did not believe him, therefore to show this was true he hacked and posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s, a fellow former hacker and CEO of Facebook, wall. Khalil did this because at the time Facebook and Microsoft were offering awards in the form of $5,000 to anyone who could point out any vulnerabilities in their sites or software’s.
Although Facebook refused to pay Shreateh the bounty he deserved, causing him frustration because of Facebook not acknowledging his findings as a bug, even though they quickly fixed the issue. This cop out by Facebook then got the attention of fellow white hat hacker Marc Maiffret, the infamous hacker who discovered the Code Red vulnerability that had plagued Microsoft Windows users in the mid-2000s, and made him want to do something about it. So Maiffret ponied up $3,000 of his own money to kick start a fund to raise the money he felt Shreateh was owed. He eventually raised $13,000 for Shreateh, but before giving it to him he had to do his due diligence to make sure he found the real Khalil and then gave it to him personally.
In an interview with USA Today Maiffret was quoted, “I really wanted to make a statement for the larger community, that we need to take care of researchers like this to make sure they continue to want to report things like this to companies like Facebook,” Maiffret says. “Otherwise, it’s going to end up in the underground being used to break into companies.” This shows the white hacker community really cares about keeping things positive and helping those with skills to keep them from going dark and using their skills in an evil way just to harm society. And it worked, in the same article Khalil was stated saying, “I would like to get a good job to have a good life,” says Shreateh, adding that he is grateful to Maiffret and all who donated. “We can make the world secure and a safe place to live beside each other, with love.”
This just goes to show that learning these skills to be an ethical hacker can really pay off and make you some important contacts and possibly even friends. Learning these skills of hacking is very important if you want to be in the cyber security or counter intelligence field and it’s always important to keep up to date and always be learning to be able to stay on top of the new technologies and threats coming out every single day.
Capella University posted on their blog in Oct. of 2014 some important tools and tips to becoming an ethical hacker stating, “ Learning how to hack helps information security professionals implement the strongest possible security practices. It’s as much about finding and fixing security vulnerabilities as it is anticipating them. As you learn more about the methods hackers use to infiltrate systems, you’ll be able to preemptively resolve issues; if you don’t understand how black hat hackers could get in to your systems, you’re going to have a hard time securing them.” This statement is very similar to how a good detective finds a criminal, to catch a criminal you have to think like a criminal and the same applies to cyber security, to keep a hacker out you have to think about how the hacker would get in.
Another example of a hacker wanting to help better the world with his skills is Ymir Vigfusson. In a Tedx Talk Ymir Vigfusson talks about his hacking adventures from a teenager to an adult and dealing with these moral issues and knowing what was right and wrong. Ymir speaks about doing something wrong when he hacked an Icelandic internet service provider and in the process one of his family members made a phone call disconnecting him from the server. This left the server in such disarray that even Ymir could not get back into it. Now he had a very tough decision to make at this point, does he do nothing and hope he doe not get caught or does he inform the company of what he has done and face whatever recourse they feel he deserves? So what does he do, he does the right thing and goes to the company to face the recourse they deem necessary, and what happens? Well he meets with the System Administrator and it turns out the System Administrator was an amateur hacker and was actually very delighted to meet them and even offered them a part time job, where Ymir and his friend worked for several years. This just goes to show that hackers who an do the right thing are worth having on your team and will make the world a better place.
