Systems Hakkers, Crackers, and Phreakers

There is always discussion about whether to call "those who break into computers" hackers or crackers or something else altogether. The term "hacker" once had a highly respectable connotation among computer people. When the (perpetually misinformed) news media learned of the prevalence of people breaking into and accessing computers unlawfully, they began referring to those individuals as hackers as well. As a result, people in the security field began to refer to "the bad hackers" as haquers, crackers, or something equally confusing. Rather than perpetuate the argument, I will simply mispell hacker deliberately: A "hakker" is someone who accesses and uses computer or network resources to which he or she is not authorized. In many cases, the techniques used to access these systems result in damage to the systems (modification of files, etc). In all cases, damage is done, if for no other reason than because it makes more work for the already overworked systems administrator.

These pages are not here condone or condemn hakkers and hakking. They are provided as an educational resource for systems administrators and security professionals who wish to better understand their adversary and the motivation behind their actions. Use of the information that you find at many of these sites is probably illegal. You should take everything you read here with a grain of salt, but please maintain a healthy degree of mistrust. You aren't being paranoid because there really are nasty people out to attack your computer systems.

Hakker Home Pages

These are bound to move around and disappear very frequently. Please be extremely careful about accessing these pages... you should probably disable Java, JavaScript, and Cookie exchanges in your WWW browser, insert a bogus E-mail address in your preferences, and don't poke around here from behind your own firewall or secure perimeter. Be really careful about filling in forms and downloading programs from these guys ... you never know who is on the other side gathering information about you. On the other hand ... many of these pages have been placed on the web for information purposes only, and will eventually migrate to the Meta-pages Lists once I figure out how to separate the two types.

Hobby ISP's

These are folks who provide Internet Services at a discount, and under total anonymity. Most of the operators have real jobs and do this as a hobby on the side. I've found these sites linked into other peoples' H/P/C pages, and if you visit the pages of the users of these systems, you will find much interesting information along those lines. However, I would not go so far as to call these people Hakkers.

Hakker/Phreaker Conventions

Hakker/Phreaker 'Zines

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Author: Rob Jenson
Last Revised: $Date: 1997/04/26 17:29:34 $ $Revision: 1.2 $
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