Dueling Hackers: Difference between revisions

* ''[[wikipediaw:The Cuckoochr(27)Cuckoo's Egg (book)|The Cuckoo's Egg]]'' is a first-hand account of real-life Dot Combat from 1986. Clifford Stoll was asked by his supervisor to find the cause of a $0.75 billing anomaly in the accounts; over ten months, he followed the trail from that, to a hacker who was breaching American military networks looking for information on the Nuclear and SDI programs and selling what he stole to the KGB.

* Nations and political factions anywhere from the level of superpowers to the level of terrorist rings regularly keep an arsenal of offensive, defensive, or just Signint (signals intelligence) apps. As well as hacker teams to run them. One of the most famous was the Stuxnet virus which leapfrogged from computer to computer deleting itself in any that did not contain what it'sits instructions told it to target until it reached it'sits preytarget. This happened to be the Iranian nuclear facilities. and Stuxnet is generally suspected to have been launched by the US and/or Israeli secret services. It was quickly picked up, tracked, and dissected remarkably soon by white hatters from security companies but by that time it had done what it had been intended to do. In this case the perps and the white hats were each other's [[Worthy Opponent|Worthy Opponents]]s kind of by accident and the Iranians were not a player as they got stomped from the get-go.

**The Stuxnet had five Zerozero-day exploits in it. A Zero zero-day exploit is a bug no one knows about but you. To compare, it is like being the Texas Rangers taking revolvers to battle and the Commanche don't know about it yet. Zero-days are normally carefully hoarded or sold to a cyberwarfare [[Arms Dealer]] at high price depending on how good itthey isare. To fire off five of them in one virus means you either have a lot to fire off or you really want to hit your target.