Hackers, Crackers, and Thieves

Right now a hacker could be stealing financial and personal information from your network, capturing user IDs and passwords, stealing credit and account information, changing your system to conceal their presence and installing a “back door” to allow them to return again and again. And they might not be old enough to vote.

Internet thieves need little skill or experience to penetrate a wide-open network, and sometimes the sites they target volunteer to help, responding with error messages that serve up clues about security, server specifications, and what software is in use.

“Cracker” is the proper term applied to these malicious break-in artists, whose tricks include cross-site scripting (redirecting your customers to someone else’s website) and buffer overflows (causing harmful code to be run on your computers). Your own employees may unwittingly aid in the effort, responding to the enticement of pornography, or even a bogus security warning offering advice on how to deal with the virus “they” have detected on your machine. Nor do crackers keep the weaknesses they uncover to themselves; the tools, knowledge, and techniques they pioneer soon spread your exposure to an entire community of thieves.