_ISR_m3rc_ Wrote:That's what wikipedia will tell you.
A hacker is a person who learns the lanuage of his computer,
finds holes and bypasses around restricted things.
Being a hacker is a sense of mind, that you are
finding these bypasses, and evetually move on to web/network
security.
From there, you learn how to make your server secure,
while you exploit others to find holes or backdoors.
Hacking is not all the "breaking into hotmail" type stuff.
That's for script kiddies, and they normally get caught at it.
Breaking into other persons, personal and private information
is considered cracking, which is what can get you in trouble,
(and what I have done a few times....)
So really, the definition never changed, it's just that
wikipedia never got it right the first time...
(PS> I'm gonna search CS.NET for a definition that someone else wrote,
much better than me)
_ISR_m3rc_
What ISR said is right, the best PC security experts in the world are also the best hackers.
My home system and network are secure mainly because I've got a certification in Network Security, but also because I used to hack bits and pieces.
It's just people that end up doing this (using a hole I've now found in MyBB 1.1.7 and am yet to fix): http://interweb.neopian-hosting.com (hacked at time of post), that are NOT true hackers. Defacing or destroying someone's site in protest means nothing, it's just an annoyance, they don't prove anything. True, you could hack someone's site that got on your nerves or something like that, but in protest for Islam? Not the best idea in current circumstances.
I shan't disclose the security risk here until I'm 100% certain that I can fix it.
But as a note to all running MyBB, switch off version numbers and change where the admin DIR is.
(Even though I do this on all of my sites, the bug is still exploitable. This just lowers the possibility.)