From owner-freebsd-newbies Fri Jun 2 5:33: 3 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from hydrant.intranova.net (hydrant.intranova.net [209.201.95.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E938537BE80 for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 05:32:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from oogali@intranova.net) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hydrant.intranova.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 526D4E0E92; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 08:34:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 08:34:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Omachonu Ogali To: Bob Collins Cc: freebsd newbies Subject: Re: Hacker vs Cracker was In-Reply-To: <3937A420.13BB2AC9@bellsouth.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Bob Collins wrote: > What is the difference between a hacker and a cracker? > I see the terms used so loosely, does anyone really know? Usually a hacker is someone who goes around on a 'knowledge quest', not to use the information for illicit purposes, but for the sake of satisfying their curiocity, I think it would be safe to assume that 99% of 'hackers' aren't out to cause property/intellectual damage. A cracker on the other hand, is a skilled (or with the recent addition of compile-and-go programs: hardly skilled) person who uses their knowledge and resources for illicit purposes, such as denial-of-service attacks, web page defacements, and in this case "rm -rf /*". Nowadays, it doesn't take much to be a cracker, which is one of the problems that computer incidents are rising, all you need to know how to do is compile a program and run it, hardly any coding involved. Unfortunately, these programs are so available that 'mafiaboy' occurences aren't as rare as people think, add a pinch of IRC to reality, and you'll see that these illicit activities occur everyday, from host compromises to denial-of-service attacks to distributed denial-of-service attack networks (like this year's attacks against Ebay, Yahoo, CNN, Excite, and CNet). -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Omachonu Ogali oogali@intranova.net | | Intranova Networking Group http://www.intranova.net | | PGP Key ID: 0xBFE60839 | | PGP Fingerprint: 8 51 14 FD 2A 87 53 D1 E3 AA 12 12 01 93 BD 34 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message