by Joshua Mccracken

Created on: August 06, 2008

In today's world, the term "computer hacker" is used to describe criminals that break into computer systems that they are not authorized to have access to. Despite the stigma that you average person attaches to hackers, the vast majority of them are not all that intelligent. In fact, most self-proclaimed computer hackers are nothing more than wannabes, referred to as "script kiddies" or "code kiddies".

Though web page defacements and customer databases being compromised often make the news, the truth is that these types of attacks do not often require very advanced technical skills. Some may wonder how I could possibly know anything about computer hackers? Who am I to tell you any of this? I was one of them.

From an early age, I was drawn to the dark side of the internet. I can remember when I was twelve was when I began reading gtmhh by Carolyn Meinel. Soon after was the first time that I played with Sub7 and Netbus, two script kiddie programs used for backdooring, or maintaining unauthorized access to infected computer systems.

By the time I was seventeen, when I wasn't out making other stupid decisions, I was hanging out in nefarious channels (chat rooms) in IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I had already begun programming in Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C++, two computer programming languages used to develop computer software. I was already dual booting Debian Linux (Linux is the hacker's favorite Operating System) and Windows. Dual booting means that I had a bootloader (I used Grub) that would allow me to select which operating system I wanted to use whenever I started the computer.

The cool thing about C++ is that if you know C++ then you pretty much already know C, which is the programming language that Linux uses almost exclusively to build applications. In fact, most Linux programs are open-source, meaning that you can download files with text in them that are filled with the program code. When you compile source code it becomes binary and usually takes the form of an executable file. In Windows, those files end with ".exe" but in Linux they have no extension. The wonderful thing about having source code for programs is that you can easily tweak the program. You can make dramatic improvements, or add backdoors and redistribute the code, just to name a few options.

It didn't take long for me to begin port scanning University networks using programs like nmap. I was able to find internet protocol (ip for short) address ranges for school networks using a service

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