Perpetrators

You often hear the nomenclature of hacker, intruder, script kiddie, virus writer, bot herder, and phreaker. Just what sorts of people are these, anyway?

Hackers

Calling someone a hacker is a broad-brush term implicating almost any person of ill will who has a mouse in hand, but actually the real hacker is a rare breed indeed. The genuine hacker is extremely knowledgeable, patient, creative, and resourceful. He is determined to find a new exploit in some particular system, protocol, or program. He studies the architecture and design of his target in order to find a weakness and exploit it.

Hackers are often employees with day jobs who experiment after hours. Most hackers are socially responsible and want to discover weaknesses and help get them fixed before icky, bad people discover them and cause real damage.

Many years ago, being a hacker was a badge of honor, associated with intelligence and ingenuity. But in popular culture, the term now insinuates troublemaking and criminal activity.

Script kiddies

Script kiddies are individuals with nowhere near the technical acumen of real hackers. Instead, they acquire programs, tools, and scripts developed by hackers in order to carry out attacks. Frequently script kiddies don’t even know how their attack tools work.

Don’t underestimate the power of script kiddies, however. If they choose, they can cause significant damage to systems and networks if they’re determined to attack them. A fool with a tool may still be a fool, but with the right tool that fool can be very powerful.

Virus writers

Like hackers and script kiddies, virus writers - or VXers - can span a broad range of expertise. Some virus writers are highly skilled and creative, quite able to engineer a good virus on their own. But like script kiddies, many virus writers rely upon templates and cookbooks to create subtle variations of existing viruses.

Professional perps and organized crime

The U.S. Treasury Department reported in 2006 that organized criminals are now making more money on cyber crime and fraud than they do through drug trafficking. That chilling statistic should make you sit up and take notice: We are no longer dealing with angry children, but with deranged adults with profiteering and troublemaking as their profession. There is now big money behind the development of viruses, bots, Trojan horses, and other means for stealing money from organizations, governments, banks, and the general public!

Bot herders

Bot herders are individuals who establish, grow, and use bot armies to carry out attacks and cause other types of trouble. They may develop their own bot software, but mostly they use bot software developed by others.

Phreakers

The original phreakers were people who cracked telephone networks in order to get free long distance. Improvements in telephone networks have rendered the original techniques useless, and some resorted to outright criminal acts such as stealing long-distance calling cards.

The term phreakers is sometimes used to describe hackers who try to break into systems and services in order to get free services.

Black hats and white hats

These are just terms for the bad guys and the good guys, respectively. There is a Black Hat security conference, and we hear it’s interesting. Guess who goes.