Cracking In The 21st Century:

  In the 1980s, when personal computers were just starting to exist in
people's homes, computer cracking was something anyone could do. Back then,
few people were even aware of the existence or significance of computer
security, and those who knew about "hackers" usually weren't familiar with
how they worked. Computers were designed to be accessible and easy-to-use,
not secure. People used weak passwords, often using their first name or login
name for a password, password files were unshadowed and accessible to anyone,
many systems came with factory-installed logins which could be used as
backdoors by anyone who knew about them, and overall computers were designed
with a blind eye to security. Those were the golden days of computer
penetration, when any person, given enough patience and technical know-how,
could get into virtually any computer.
  Things certainly have changed. The threat of so-called "hackers" seems to
be an ever-growing news item. Software is being designed with security in
mind. Encryption is widely-used and available to anyone, and computers have
become powerful enough to use it routinely, which was not the case before.
Not only are anti-virus programs more common on home computers than they have
ever been before, but "personal firewalls", which didn't even exist a few
years ago, are beginning to pop up everywhere, to the point where even people
who aren't terribly computer-savvy have them installed to protect against
Internet snoops.
  The definition of a "hacker" has also changed. I'm not even talking about
the much-flogged difference between a "hacker" and a "cracker"; I'm pointing
to the fact that a great many "hacks" these days take the form of DoS (Denial
of Service) attacks, which serve no purpose other than to disable the
computers they target. This is a violation of the Cracker Ethic (and yes,
there used to be such a thing) for two reasons: First of all, it's damaging
to the target computers, and a key rule of cracking has always been to never
damage or destroy any machine you penetrate. Secondly, it doesn't really
achieve anything anyway. Cracking has always been about exploration. It's
always been about finding secret data, getting into places you weren't
supposed to be. DoS attacks don't get you any information from the target
computer; They just disable it.
  In the grand old days, a skilled cracker could penetrate several computers
of major companies in one sitting. And after that, the cracker would explore
the computer, and afterwards leave it without anyone noticing s/he had been
there. Even if a cracker was discovered, the system administrator often
ignored them if they weren't doing any harm. There was a sort of "gentleman's
agreement" among computer users that if you didn't harm any computers you
cracked, you wouldn't get into trouble unless you ticked off the sysadmin.
For such a thing to happen today would be inconceivable. Those days are gone
forever. These days, a mere network scan can be cause for legal action.
  Throughout the 1980s, science-fiction writers and computer enthusiasts
alike were speculating about what form cracking would take through the 90s
and beyond. Their forecasts for the future differed, but one thing was
generally agreed upon: As long as there were computers and computer networks,
there would be crackers breaking into them.
  Amazingly, they were all wrong. If the 1980s was the decade that gave birth
to cracking, the 1990s are the decade that killed it. Cracking has become a
field of lamers and script kiddies who think that launching DoS attacks gives
them skill. Furthermore, security is tight enough now that even the best
crackers are lucky to get into anything anymore. Oh, sure, you can exploit
the occasional hole on a web server if the admin was careless enough to leave
it unpatched, but beyond exploits (which are being discovered and patched all
the time), there are no real methods which work anymore. Even social
engineering isn't what it used to be; People are less likely to pass out free
information to anyone who sounds authoritative enough.
  Today, being a hacker/cracker doesn't mean you break into computers. It
means you're familiar with the issues surrounding computer security. The
crackers of today discuss buffer overflows and CGI script flaws, but how many
of them could actually crack a given system, if you asked them to? Not many.
This isn't necessarily because they know less than the crackers of old; It's
just because hardware and software is more secure.
  As security becomes tighter, and laws become tougher, there is less and
less reason to crack. Most surely, it is no longer the light, innocent, fun
game it was once capable of being. Today, being able to make a real crack
requires a lot of determination and time, more than most people are willing
to put into a simple hobby, especially one with fewer and fewer rewards. Even
some truly skilled crackers are beginning to stop. It just requires putting
too much into it, for too little in return.
  Cracking will probably never die completely. There will always be holes in
systems that can be exploited. No software program is ever perfect. But what
once was a fun, friendly, and relatively harmless activity has become an ugly
world of ignorance and confusion. And that world shows no sign of ever
returning to what it once was.
  As it happens, the cracker world seriously began to disintegrate at around
the same time as the whole "e-business" craze did. In the early days of the
Internet, startup companies could turn a huge amount of stock investments,
even when they had no product or service to offer, nor any business plan of
any kind. This went on for a few years, as companies like Yahoo! and
amazon.com became the darlings of the stock market despite being seemingly
incapable of actually making profit. Then, it suddenly started to fall apart,
as investors realized they had been putting billions of dollars into empty
companies.
  The stock market crashed, along with the cracker underground. The magic is
gone from the computer scene. The old world, a computer world in which
anything seemed possible, collapsed. It was replaced by a practical world in
which security was considered as crucial as anything else, because as the
world becomes more dependant on the Internet as a way of doing business, it
won't stand for sites going down because of DoS attacks or site defacements.
As the Internet matures into a tool which anyone, even the computer
illiterate can use, it must necessarily become more foolproof, more secure,
and more realistic in its projections for the future. And that's exactly
what's happening.
  That's good news for anyone who actually wants to use the Net to do
something "useful". But for the crackers who used to get their thrills from
cruising the networks, browsing data they weren't supposed to read but which
nobody knew they could see, the old days are gone for good.