Girl Geekette dotNet

For those who can appreciate the old-school definition and are not following the "mass hysteria" of the media by using the wrong word (meaning those who use "hacker" instead of "cracker"), there is some hope Not all of the media is ignorant in these things thankfully. There are a lot of people associated with media outlets that do use the term correctly. And for this, I am very thankful. Over the years, I have written articles (or rants) such as Hacking to Learn - What the Media Does’t Tell You and others in hope that the general population would someday come to understand the difference and learn to appreciate hacking again.. as an Art or even a Science.

From one of those who know and understand the difference,  I was very happy and intrigued to run across was an article on the Whitedust Security Site. Hacking: Art or Science? is a very informative article about another point of view of hacking that I actually had not though of before. Mark Hinge has done an excellent job of explaining the ultimate question in this article: "Does the creative thinking required to be a successful “hacker” outweigh the necessity for scientific process?

In the article, Mark sums up "hacking" as just another way of "tinkering". I love how this is presented! I really feel the way he has brought this out depicts the true meaning of hacking. He goes on to stress the points and differences between hacking and cracking. Although a cracker can use hacking to achieve his or her goals, all hackers are not malicious crackers. Kudos to Mark for being among the ones who know and can appreciate the real meaning of hacking.

For those who are security minded, and those who are familiar with Unix, Linux and FreeBSD the port scanning program Nmap is a very well known one. Originally created to test vulnerabilities on a Local Area Network, this tool has become a must-have when testing security. Having been around for years, Nmap has always been open source and has developed quite a bit over time. Fyodor, the creator of Nmap has stayed right there along side of it through all of its changes.

Highly publicized, Nmap has gone through  public endorsements from Microsoft (actually endorsing the Insecure.org website for information on tools and knowledge for security), being used in the movie the Matrix by Trinity, and various books and articles published with Nmap being mentioned. As the co-author of Stealing the Network: How to Own the Continent , Fyodor even includes Nmap in his fictional chapter. (Read Fyodor’s chapter online) Soon, there will also be a book released on scanning a network with Nmap.

Whitedust has a very intriguing interview with Fyodor. In it, he talks about why he got into computers, what drove him to enjoy working with security and what started him on the trek with Nmap. In this interview, he also makes a few comments worth stressing. He notes that essentially any software created for auditing a network (for the right reasons) can always be turned around and used for the wrong reasons. He states this as a very true way: "..there is no way I can write a program that allows you to audit your own networks for security risks without also enabling bad guys to do the same. And trying to limit distribution to only ‘good guys’ is a lost cause."