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Hacker qualities

Date: July 07, 2006
Source: itworldcanada.com
By: Jim Ducharme

Remember Mafiaboy, the 13-year-old Montreal kid who took out some of the corporate world’s biggest Web sites a couple of years ago? Not long ago, I found him penning a column for a national news service.

I smiled to myself when I read comments from him regarding his past misdeeds, as he seemed to be suggesting he didn’t get the credit he deserved for the havoc he caused through his “denial-of-service” (DoS) attacks (which also got him a well-earned eight months in detention for his exploits). He casually tosses around the term “hacker”, but it’s just not that cut and dry.

Often, you hear the media tag a person as a hacker only because that individual uses the tricks of that trade. That’s a rather simplistic point of view. For example, just because you use a baseball bat to break into my car does not make you a Blue Jay. It simply makes you a thug who knows how to swing.

Those in the know have for years tried to fight the hysteria and misinformation from many media outlets about the hacking culture. It’s a losing battle when you consider that every troubled 13-year-old with too much time on their hands relishes being referred to as a hacker, when, in fact, they are really no different than a vandal who smashes your car window or steals your PIN to access your account.

Writing virus scripts, launching attacks on Web sites or stealing personal information for the purpose of fraud does not make one a hacker.
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