I cant stand people who think "hacking" is so easy

[QuantumPhysics]

Everyone in my school says oOoo its so easy to 'hack" but when i actually ask them to do it, they say no no, its easy. I can sit down for 5 minutes download a program and hack. F***ing morons... You are using someone elses program that doesnt mean you can do anything (Sorry for the language, im just so heavily taunted by this). Just because the media makes it look like it takes 2 seconds doesnt mean its real. People sit on the computer so much and they think they know it... Just because you read about others doing it doesnt mean its easy. You get my drift?

Mod Edit: Removed swearing.

[Dan]

The word "hacking" or "hack" in this context has basically lost all meaning thanks to horrible reporting regarding anything remotely related to computer security. I think the real issue you should be worked up about is poor reporting regarding anything internet or technology related in the main stream media rather then kids finding logged in Facebook profiles and posting "OMGZ I HAXORED YOUZ!!!!111one!!!".

As for weather "hacking" is easy, that relay depends on what you define "hacking" as and the system in question. If by "hacking" we mean finding new "0 day" exploits in production systems, then it reality depends on how well that system was made. It can be easy to find issues with software that was made with no regard for security, however, such exploits often fall in to well known security anti-patterns (SQL injections, XSS, buffer overflows, no verification on user input, security through obscurity, trusting the client software, etc) and are hardly noteworthy as a novel attack. In fact there are tools for automating the detection of theses security issues which only require a person to understand there use and how to use an exploit once found.

[Insectoid]

Just a couple more posts and you can join the user lounge and swear all you like!

[mirhagk]

It is super easy to hack. I hack all the time, in fact I'm taking a break from hacking to write this right now.

Hacking does not mean breaking into something, that's generally called cracking, or phishing (more common nowadays).

Hacking is just doing something clever with the computer, hacking is being "sloppy" to make something neat.

here's a neat hack for a swap function:

code:

a =1 b = 2 a = a xor b b = a xor b a = a xor b

The above is a perfect definition of hacking. Something that does something neat (swaps 2 variables without using a temporary variable). It may be useful in very specific circumstances (maybe all your vars are in registers, with none free) but in general it won't help, may hinder, and just causes mass confusion to others.

"hacking" in the cracking sense came about because people did some neat things with phone lines, the most notable of which was using a whistle from a cracker jack box to make free long distance phone calls. This might've helped you yes, but more likely it was just done because it's pretty fun to find little tricks that do unexpected things.

If you're talking about "hacking" in the sense of breaking into systems, then it's EXTREMELY easy. You could probably guess a lot of your friends passwords, or just use password reset, or convince someone to give you what you need to log in.

[QuantumPhysics]

Well thanks to Dan & mirhagk, I now understand the difference between hacking and penetration (which is what i meant to illustrate in my post).
Insectoid - You are allowed to swear in the users lounge?

Thanks to all!

[Insectoid]

Yep. That doesn't mean we do though. The lounge isn't really used for much.

The VIP lounge, on the other hand, is like a never-ending party.

[mirhagk]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/ A great example of hacking was with the altair basic interpreter. Microsoft made a basic interpreter than ran on a machine that had 4K of memory. The interpreter itself was 3351 bytes of memory, which is insane.

It was hack because it did messed up evil things in it. One particular thing is noted in the article. Basically instructions could be 1, 2 or 3 bytes long. This prompted bill gates to make a jump instruction that jumped literally into the middle of another command. one instruction ran when 3 bytes were used, another when 2 bytes were used, so the managed to save a couple of bytes by doing probably the most hideous thing ever done in software history.

[QuantumPhysics]

I can "hack", I just didnt understand the difference between hacking and penetration

[Aange10]

Insectoid @ 20/10/2012, 5:05 am wrote:

Yep. That doesn't mean we do though. The lounge isn't really used for much.

The VIP lounge, on the other hand, is like a never-ending party.

Too bad the last post - that you can see in the off topic forum - was 5 months ago (:

[mirhagk]

Completely necro post (bad mirhagk) but here is an awesome site for hacking:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#RoundUpPowerOf2

That specific hack is one of my favourites, and I just did it in my program instead of the naive 2^((int)ln(x)) and I got a 100x performance increase.

[[Gandalf]]

Oy, bit twiddling hacks - the worst kind!

Crazy what kinds of optimizations some people come up with!

[TokenHerbz]

Compression Bombs are amazing...

How many posts for the lounge? OR VIP Lounge!??

[alison12345]

I asked few of my frs about hacking . They said that it's really easy when i said to them show me how? they told me that it takes time . So you see it's not that easy and i think that a good programmer can be a good hacker and also a question arise??? that hacking is against the law.

[randint]

Hacking? It is "computationally difficult" in that you have no way to do discrete logarithms efficiently

By hacking I mean breaking such things as RSA encryption schemes