by Art Redwood

Created on: June 23, 2008   Last Updated: July 15, 2011

I read a very well known and respected Linux publication regularly, I love the informative, timely and well researched articles that appear on their pages, but it was the editorial page that caught my attention the other day, they where describing that their site had been hacked, and there was a little light hearted banter in the editorial between the boss and the subordinate that administered the site, about the application of security patches and certain OS upgrades, that would have prevented the attack in the first place.

It was the white hackers or the authors and owners of the site and mag, that found out that there was malicious code inserted into their site by a black hacker, and not the ordinary net citizens, that regularly log into the site to catch up with the latest community gossip.

I use this analogy of white and black to illustrate that within the hacking community there are usually two distinct camps of people, the black hacker's are those that want to do harm, or are inquisitive to the point that they become a nuisance to site administrators, and the white hackers are comprised of the developers and community minded individuals, that consistently repair, patch, upgrade, inform and generally secure the underlying OS, that your computer hardware hosts, that makes computers manageable and usable for the rest of us.

I consider myself quiet experienced in the running of a computer and the peripherals that accompany it, but when it comes to deciphering the code that constitutes a DoS attack on someones site server, or home computer, (and I've tried to read a few of them,) it leaves me with an all too familiar blank look on my face, I have read with great interest how one hacker caught another hacker that had intended using his site to host bots that where to be used in a DoS attack on other internet servers, by tracing log files, traffic, his own ingenuity and some damn fine coding, to the point that he turned the tails on the (black) hacker so that he was the one that eventually got hacked.

Now if that was me and remember I consider myself quiet good, I would never have even realized that my site or system would have been comprised in the first place, you need someone who is familiar, intimate and fluent in the most inner working of computer languages to help guard those of us that are lees blessed in that department, so that we don't fall fowl to their dark machinations.

It would be interesting to see how Johnny-come-ordinary-net -citizen would

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