#hack whitehat

[osintelligence]

https://tcrn.ch/3D7NfN1 - 👮‍♀️ The U.S. government has indicted Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity professional, for hacking a cryptocurrency exchange and stealing approximately $9 million in cryptocurrency. Ahmed is a former senior security engineer for an unnamed international technology company, with his LinkedIn profile listing him as a former employee at Amazon. His specialized skills in reverse engineering smart contracts and blockchain audits were reportedly used in the execution of the attack. #CyberSecurity #CryptocurrencyTheft #CyberCrime 🔎 Although the victim was not officially named, the description of the hack points towards Crema Finance, a Solana-based exchange. The hack occurred around the same date (July 2 and 3, 2022) as Ahmed is alleged to have targeted an unnamed exchange. Post the hack, the attacker returned about $8 million in cryptocurrency, keeping the rest. Ahmed reportedly offered to return all but $1.5 million of the stolen funds if the exchange refrained from reporting the incident to law enforcement. #CryptoExchange #Hack #EthicalHacking ⚖️ The practice of hackers stealing and returning part of the stolen cryptocurrency has been known in the crypto and web3 world, sometimes referred to as "white hats." However, this practice resides in a gray area, as this case exemplifies. Returning some stolen funds does not prevent prosecution. Ahmed, now accused of wire fraud and money laundering, allegedly used his professional expertise to conduct the theft and tried to launder the stolen cryptocurrency through various transactions. #WhiteHat #CryptoLaws #DigitalAssets 🔍 Lastly, Ahmed was reportedly seen searching online for information about the hack, his criminal liability, attorneys specializing in similar cases, potential law enforcement investigations, and even ways to flee the U.S. to avoid criminal charges.

[xenjin450]

https://github.com/xenjin450

I Teach CyberSecurity/Ethical-Hacking , Subscribe To My Youtube To Learn Beginner/Advanced Pentesting.

[ltechofficial]

ok so Im like really hyperfixated on this world and I kinda wanna write something about it, so I'm curious on what your thoughts are on the concept of a fluff yuri setup of a whitehat hacker girl and an illegally stolen "jailbroke" OS. I know you said that LTech has really good security measures but I just love the idea of someone being like super against the idea of OS's (maybe her gf was made into one or something) and hacking LTech's servers just to realize she has no clue how to deprogram somebody and keeps accidentally programming them even more everytime she tries to use the software she stole.

Yes i love this idea!! I absolutely support hacker characters and think there is lots of skilled ppl working on cracking OSeditor all the time... And i assume most of them are T4T yuri anarchist couples so please do make writings and fan ocs and everything

[mariacallous]

In the near future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.

Case in point: as of this writing, an AI system is sitting at the top of several leaderboards on HackerOne—an enterprise bug bounty system. The AI is XBOW, a system aimed at whitehat pentesters that “autonomously finds and exploits vulnerabilities in 75 percent of web benchmarks,” according to the company’s website.

AI-assisted hackers are a major fear in the cybersecurity industry, even if their potential hasn’t quite been realized yet. “I compare it to being on an emergency landing on an aircraft where it’s like ‘brace, brace, brace’ but we still have yet to impact anything,” Hayden Smith, the cofounder of security company Hunted Labs, tells WIRED. “We’re still waiting to have that mass event.”

Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to code. The LLMs improve every day, new models spit out more efficient code, and companies like Microsoft say they’re using AI agents to help write their codebase. Anyone can spit out a Python script using ChatGPT now, and vibe coding—asking an AI to write code for you, even if you don’t have much of an idea how to do it yourself—is popular; but there’s also vibe hacking.

“We’re going to see vibe hacking. And people without previous knowledge or deep knowledge will be able to tell AI what it wants to create and be able to go ahead and get that problem solved,” Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, tells WIRED.

Vibe hacking frontends have existed since 2023. Back then, a purpose-built LLM for generating malicious code called WormGPT spread on Discord groups, Telegram servers, and darknet forums. When security professionals and the media discovered it, its creators pulled the plug.

WormGPT faded away, but other services that billed themselves as blackhat LLMs, like FraudGPT, replaced it. But WormGPT’s successors had problems. As security firm Abnormal AI notes, many of these apps may have just been jailbroken versions of ChatGPT with some extra code to make them appear as if they were a stand-alone product.

Better then, if you’re a bad actor, to just go to the source. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are easily jailbroken. Most LLMs have guard rails that prevent them from generating malicious code, but there are whole communities online dedicated to bypassing those guardrails. Anthropic even offers a bug bounty to people who discover new ones in Claude.

“It’s very important to us that we develop our models safely,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. “We take steps to reduce the risk of malicious use, and we’re continually improving safeguards to make our models more robust against exploits like jailbreaks. For example, you can read our research and approach to jailbreaks in the GPT-4.5 system card, or in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini system card.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, security researchers at Trend Micro got ChatGPT to generate malicious code by prompting it into the role of a security researcher and pentester. ChatGPT would then happily generate PowerShell scripts based on databases of malicious code.

“You can use it to create malware,” Moussouris says. “The easiest way to get around those safeguards put in place by the makers of the AI models is to say that you’re competing in a capture-the-flag exercise, and it will happily generate malicious code for you.”

Unsophisticated actors like script kiddies are an age-old problem in the world of cybersecurity, and AI may well amplify their profile. “It lowers the barrier to entry to cybercrime,” Hayley Benedict, a Cyber Intelligence Analyst at RANE, tells WIRED.

But, she says, the real threat may come from established hacking groups who will use AI to further enhance their already fearsome abilities.

“It’s the hackers that already have the capabilities and already have these operations,” she says. “It’s being able to drastically scale up these cybercriminal operations, and they can create the malicious code a lot faster.”

Moussouris agrees. “The acceleration is what is going to make it extremely difficult to control,” she says.

Hunted Labs’ Smith also says that the real threat of AI-generated code is in the hands of someone who already knows the code in and out who uses it to scale up an attack. “When you’re working with someone who has deep experience and you combine that with, ‘Hey, I can do things a lot faster that otherwise would have taken me a couple days or three days, and now it takes me 30 minutes.’ That's a really interesting and dynamic part of the situation,” he says.

According to Smith, an experienced hacker could design a system that defeats multiple security protections and learns as it goes. The malicious bit of code would rewrite its malicious payload as it learns on the fly. “That would be completely insane and difficult to triage,” he says.

Smith imagines a world where 20 zero-day events all happen at the same time. “That makes it a little bit more scary,” he says.

Moussouris says that the tools to make that kind of attack a reality exist now. “They are good enough in the hands of a good enough operator,” she says, but AI is not quite good enough yet for an inexperienced hacker to operate hands-off.

“We’re not quite there in terms of AI being able to fully take over the function of a human in offensive security,” she says.

The primal fear that chatbot code sparks is that anyone will be able to do it, but the reality is that a sophisticated actor with deep knowledge of existing code is much more frightening. XBOW may be the closest thing to an autonomous “AI hacker” that exists in the wild, and it’s the creation of a team of more than 20 skilled people whose previous work experience includes GitHub, Microsoft, and a half a dozen assorted security companies.

It also points to another truth. “The best defense against a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” Benedict says.

For Moussouris, the use of AI by both blackhats and whitehats is just the next evolution of a cybersecurity arms race she’s watched unfold over 30 years. “It went from: ‘I’m going to perform this hack manually or create my own custom exploit,’ to, ‘I’m going to create a tool that anyone can run and perform some of these checks automatically,’” she says.

“AI is just another tool in the toolbox, and those who do know how to steer it appropriately now are going to be the ones that make those vibey frontends that anyone could use.”

[reportscam]

Hack Someone Device Wirelessly.

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#hacking #devine #device #android #cpp #procoder#programming #java #python #wireless #blackhat #whitehat #Black #white #instagram #viral #instagood #cybercrime #cyberday #cybrtrk #cybersecurity

[thewickedbohemian]

Maybe the next could be kinda after society's rebuilt to give us sorta "Avatar in a modern setting" (and not just saying this because fire would be next in the cycle after this and whenever I've thought about bending in a modern setting I've always had this image in my head of a firebender using lightningbending to hack by controlling the electricity in the devices so if we could have a closer-to-modernity-than-even-Korra Avatar show setting once Seven Havens hopefully ends with things, I hate to use a politically-loaded phrase but, "built back better", I thought it might be a cool concept to have an Avatar who regardless of what the Avatar thing does to their social status has as their "other job" (because lbr being an Avatar could feel like one) being some sort of whitehat hacker a la Penelope Garcia or Alec Hardison and now wants to use the rest of their powers for the same kind of fighting for justice)

Okay, on a more serious note about “Avatar Seven Havens”, the one thing I’m disappointed about with the series is that it seems like Avatar Studios is too afraid of continuing the thread from Korra. I feel like there was a lot of room to really explore the state of the world after Korra, such as the new Airbenders trying to form their own nation, new alliances being formed, the Avatar feeling more and more like a relic of the past due to the advancement of technology.

Instead, they went the post-apocalyptic route. Sounds interesting, but it also feels like it was done because the writers were either afraid of continuing the world expansion started by Korra or just didn’t know how. Personally, I’m leaning towards they didn’t know how considering how Legend of Korra approached more serious topics (coughnonbenderdiscriminationcough). So instead of dealing with things that are beyond their capabilities, such as complex politics, they wipe the board clean so that it’s back to spirits and magic.

That’s the one thing I’m disappointed by. I’m actually fine with everything else. Korra being a hated figure could work as a meta-narrative on Korra’s actual reputation in the fanbase. The Avatar being a hated figure is something I actually really like since that’s a natural development for this kind of character. If there’s a superhuman figure existing in the world whose main responsibility is keeping the peace between the nations, then none of the nations actually have freedom/autonomy since the Avatar is the world police. It makes sense that the Avatar would eventually be hated once the people realize they have to abide by this superhuman’s authority, especially since the Korra series introduced democracy.

But the post-apocalyptic setting…it feels like a cop-out. In my opinion, it feels like Nickelodeon didnt want the Avatar Universe to get too complex, so they reset the world in a way that the main focus will be on more cartoonish concepts. Sure, post-apocalyptic can still be dark, but the politics of Korra (and even ATLA) are gone now. Even though I have MAJOR gripes with how Korra approached politics, the show at least had the courage to take it on. But now, Nick seems to be pushing for the Avatar Universe to be a lot safer and to take less risks. I mean, look at the ATLA Netflix show, they took away Sokka’s misogyny because they thought it was too much for present day audiences.

I guess we’ll see how this goes. I like some of the ideas, but I’m skeptical overall.

[thedailydecrypt]

Whitehats or Extortionists? The Dangerous Precedent of the Loopscale Hack

In crypto, there’s a thin line between "whitehat" hero and glorified extortionist. Loopscale’s $5.8 million hack just erased it.

On April 26th, a Solana-based DeFi protocol named Loopscale got hit — hard.

In a sophisticated attack exploiting a vulnerability in its RateX pricing system, a hacker siphoned off around $5.8 million — 5.7 million USDC and 1,200 SOL — from its yield vaults.

Two days later, a deal was struck:

The hacker would return 90% of the stolen assets.

They would keep 10% (roughly 3,947 SOL, or $594,000) as a "bounty."

They would also receive legal immunity from Loopscale.

On its surface, this seems like a pragmatic win for Loopscale and its users. After all, recovering 90% of hacked funds is rare in DeFi. But let’s not kid ourselves: This isn’t a "whitehat" operation. It’s a ransomware payment. And if crypto keeps normalizing this practice, DeFi will eat itself alive.

The Rise of the 'Negotiated Hack' Era

There was a time when the term "whitehat hacker" actually meant something noble. Think 2016 DAO hacker Robin Hood Group or the early bug bounty hunters who helped projects patch flaws before launch.

Today? "Whitehat" increasingly just means "the hacker decided not to be completely evil... after robbing you blind."

The Loopscale incident fits a disturbing pattern:

Hack first.

Negotiate later.

Frame it as “security research” to dodge consequences.

This isn't ethical hacking. This is armed robbery with a press release.

Data Doesn’t Lie: Crypto's Ransom Economy Is Booming

Loopscale is just the latest in a growing trend. According to Chainalysis, more than $1.6 billion has been stolen via crypto hacks in Q1 2025 alone — the worst quarter on record.

Even worse? Only a tiny fraction of stolen funds is ever recovered. The rest vanish into mixers, sidechains, or get laundered through hard-to-trace swaps.

More and more protocols, facing the ugly truth that law enforcement moves too slow and on-chain tracking is imperfect, are choosing to negotiate payouts with their attackers.

Poly Network, 2021: $610 million stolen; hacker returned funds after "negotiations."

Euler Finance, 2023: $200 million hacked; partial recovery after bounty.

KyberSwap, 2024: $46 million lost; bounty deal offered, still unresolved.

Every time this happens, the message to future hackers is clear: If you’re smart enough to steal it, you can bargain your way into a payday.

“At Least They Got the Money Back!”

Let’s address the obvious defense:

"Negotiating with hackers is better than losing everything."

Yes, recovering funds is good. Yes, users deserve their money back.

But here’s the bigger issue: Normalizing payouts creates incentives for more sophisticated attacks. If hackers know there’s a 90% chance they’ll walk away with a "bounty" worth hundreds of thousands — or even millions — they will keep coming.

It’s the same reason companies are warned never to pay ransomware attackers in traditional cybersecurity. Pay one ransom, expect ten more attacks.

DeFi’s lack of unified standards around hacks and recoveries is turning the entire sector into a feeding ground for financially motivated attackers masquerading as whitehats.

The Broader Impact: Trust Is Fragile. DeFi Can't Afford More Cracks.

DeFi protocols like Loopscale are supposed to be trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant. Those ideals crumble when recovery depends on off-chain negotiations and trusting thieves to keep their word.

This matters beyond just Loopscale:

Investor Confidence: Every hack, every ransom deal, chips away at user trust.

Regulatory Heat: Lawmakers eager to paint DeFi as a “wild west” now have more ammunition.

Adoption Risk: Institutional players eyeing DeFi will think twice if security is this fragile.

DeFi’s superpower is code-as-law. When code fails, and negotiations become the law of the land, DeFi’s entire value proposition weakens.

DeFi Protocols Will Start Offering "Hack Insurance" by Default

Here’s where I see things heading: Within 18 months, top-tier DeFi protocols will bundle hack insurance as part of their user offerings.

Why? Because they’ll have no choice. Users are losing patience. The average DeFi investor doesn’t care about the technicalities of RateX tokens or oracle manipulation attacks. They want their money safe. Period.

Already we’re seeing moves in this direction:

Nexus Mutual and InsurAce offer decentralized insurance.

Cumberland and Chainproof are building traditional-style crypto coverage.

Base-layer chains like Solana and Avalanche are funding native security initiatives.

The future of DeFi security isn’t "hope the hacker is nice." It’s "protect users automatically."

Protocols that don’t adapt will lose TVL, credibility, and eventually relevance.

Loopscale Got Lucky. The Industry Might Not Be So Lucky Next Time.

Let’s be clear:

Loopscale handled the crisis better than most.

They moved fast.

They recovered most funds.

They communicated openly.

But they were lucky. The next protocol might not be. And the more DeFi normalizes paying off hackers, the more it invites increasingly sophisticated, larger-scale exploits.

At some point, the DeFi ecosystem has to decide:

Are we building the financial system of the future — or just a digital Wild West where the fastest gun wins?

Loopscale’s story isn’t just about one hack. It’s about the stakes of the game we’re all playing. And right now, the house is losing.

If you found this piece valuable, please consider supporting our work:

👉 Donate to our Ko-Fi page — We don't run paid subscriptions. Everything we publish is free, but your donations help us keep independent, fearless, and ad-free.

© 2025 InSequel Digital. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This article may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission.

[tradmais]

Mais de US$ 1,2 bilhão em criptomoedas roubadas por hackers até agora em 2024, relata Immunefi

[blockchainfeed]

“The bridge currently secures over $850M which is safe,” co-founder @Psycheout86 said in an X post. #Blockchain #Crypto

[ms-demeanor]

When I said I didn't have project experience with any orgs he asked "what about this conference?" And I said "I'd feel weird putting this on a resume, it's two days a year of checking people in and a few hours of design work for the program."

He asked how long I'd been doing it and I said twenty years and he visibly threw an error code so I laughed and said "seventeen, eighteen years really."

"No, fuck you, you said twenty years, what do you mean twenty years?" (Lots of informal swearing for emphasis during this chat)

"I said twenty years because I've been coming for twenty years. This con was actually my first date with my husband, so this is our 20th anniversary, but I had such a good time at the first one that I kept coming back. I'm nostalgic and this is my favorite con so I've gotten more involved over the years but it's not like I'm deeply involved in organizing, I've just been around forever. But I only started volunteering a couple years in and I don't do much so it doesn't really feel like a resume thing."

"I thought you were going to say, like. Two years. Are you saying you met your husband at a hacker conference twenty years ago and you're still volunteering with the conference because you're nostalgic?"

"We actually met at a coffee shop and this was our first date, but kinda, yeah. Also all my friends are here."

"Either way, I just got chills, oh my God, look at my goosebumps. I have something to ask you. I'm doing a series of recorded interviews in an executive development series, I would be honored if you would be my inaugural interview."

And I basically said "sure, but I still hate my job and I need to apply for regular work because I need a stable income and health insurance, what can I do to make it more likely for my resume to get looked at?" and he told me to write out a list of 40 accomplishments in a problem-solution-action format with hard numbers like hours saved and sales made and he would work with me to pare it down for prime time. Then he asked if I was on LinkedIn (and i pointed to the LinkedIn custom URL in the contact section of my resume) and that's when he told me he was out of connections and asked me to connect with him. He only gave me his first name but, hey, hacker con, so four minutes later I was looking at his YouTube and realizing that he had asked me if I had any social media presence and I'd said that I had a few thousand followers on tumblr.

After that I looked at the main hall and realized there were five professional development booths and that we'd been letting them come for years and I had no idea if all of them were like the guy I talked to because everyone I know from the con largely gets jobs from knowing people at the con (the organizer working reg with me was my coworker and carpool partner for seven years and three of my other former coworkers were there, the main conference organizer was Large Bastard's coworker for a year and large bastard referred him for the job because they knew each other from 2600 etc etc etc) and the professional groups are all "information security professionals" and "infosec collaboration" and suit and tie and sanitized and new and me and a bunch of the old fucks at the conference were talking about how sanitized the scene feels, and how people these days have such an emphasis on whitehat hacking and both blackhat and defcon are disneyland for geeks and there's such a bizarre focus on never breaking the law and anyway i think i walked away from all of that wanting to start an illegalist hackers' union.

I'm a very bad judge of these things, I'm applying to a job that i'm so excited about that I'm having trouble breathing over it, it is for a technical writing position at an open source security company.

Is ms-demeanor.com something that is reasonable to put on a resume and also are any of the following good things to list as milestones:

The De-Googling Book (it's called "Fuck Google")

The Death Book

The how to write an essay book

[billloguidice]

Take your cybersecurity into your own hands with this value-packed book bundle from Wiley!

Take your cybersecurity into your own hands with this value-packed book bundle from Wiley! #sale #cybersecurity #wiley #book #books #hacker #whitehat

Check out the bundle options at this link. Take your OpSec into your own hands with this bundle of books on cybersecurity from Wiley. In addition to comprehensive how-tos covering a variety of topics in the security space, you’ll get thrilling real-world accounts from renowned figures in the hacking world. In How I Rob Banks: And Other Such Places, ethical hacker FC shares his adventures in…

[nicdevera]

i wonder, does the vaguely worded philippine cypercrime law make pentesting and whitehat hacking illegal or unfeasible

[pdj-france]

Lors de l'événement ETHCC à Paris, Cryptonomist a interviewé Immunefi, la plateforme de bug bounty et de services de sécurité pour les contrats intelligents et les projets crypto et web3. Pouvez-vous m'en dire plus sur le nombre de primes et de hacks déjoués ? Nous avons facilité le paiement de plus de 80 millions de dollars de primes aux pirates informatiques. Il s'agit notamment de paiements record comme 10 millions de dollars pour une vulnérabilité découverte dans Wormhole, un protocole générique de messagerie inter-chaînes, et 6 millions de dollars pour une vulnérabilité découverte dans Aurora, une solution de pont et de mise à l'échelle pour Ethereum. Actuellement, il existe plus de 320 programmes de primes disponibles sur Immunefi qui offrent collectivement 158 ​​millions de dollars en récompenses aux whitehats. Grâce aux vulnérabilités présentées par notre système, nous avons empêché la violation de plus de 25 milliards de dollars de fonds et de protocoles d'utilisateurs. Comment fonctionne votre service? Immunefi est une plateforme de primes aux bogues et des services de sécurité pour les contrats intelligents et les projets Web3, où les responsables de la sécurité examinent le code, divulguent les vulnérabilités et sont payés. Immunefi supprime les problèmes de sécurité grâce à des primes de bogues et à des services de sécurité complets. Nous avons été les premiers à introduire une incitation évolutive pour les pirates, ce qui signifie que les récompenses évoluent en fonction de la gravité d'un exploit et du volume de fonds à risque. Grâce à cela, Immunefi a développé la plus grande communauté de talents en sécurité dans l'espace crypto. Immunefi reçoit une commission de 10 % en plus du montant versé au chercheur en sécurité. Le hacker whitehat obtient la pleine récompense - le paiement à Immunefi s'ajoute à ce montant et aide à payer pour sa plate-forme et son expertise. Qui sont vos clients ? Les principaux clients de l'entreprise sont les protocoles web3, les dApps, les DAO et les blockchains de premier et second niveau. Parmi les protocoles web3 les plus notables utilisant Immunefi pour exécuter leurs programmes de primes figurent des projets bien établis de plusieurs milliards de dollars tels que les protocoles Chainlink web3, Wormhole, MakerDAO, TheGraph, Synthetix, etc. Ensemble, ils détiennent plus de 60 milliards de dollars en fonds d'utilisateurs, ce qui est une cible importante pour les pirates informatiques. Quels sont les types de hacks les plus fréquents ? Les types de bogues et de hacks les plus fréquents que nous voyons : Mauvaise validation des entrées Calculs incorrects Oracle et manipulation des prix Faible contrôle d'accès Attaques de signature/malléabilité Erreurs d'arrondi IndentationPour plus d'informations, consultez notre article le plus récent ici. PDJ Plus de l'auteur

[reportscam]

3 Methods To Hack A Computer.

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#hacking #computer #hack #java #python #andriod#blackhat #whitehat #cybersecurity #cybercrime#pro #coder #coding #instagram #reel #viralreels#viral #trending #songs #blackmoney #greyhat

[astropithecus]

Obituaries: Kevin Mitnick, hacker and fugitive turned security consultant, dies at 59

In 1995 I was 11, my favorite movie was The Net, and Kevin Mitnick - sitting in federal prison - was basically a folk hero. He wasn't allowed access to a phone, because the rumor was he could start a nuclear war by whistling modem tones into a receiver. To a kid that grew up watching WarGames that was effectively a superpower.

I spent the next few formative years learning to "hack" - not entirely because of Mitnick, but it couldn't have hurt. I was the textbook script kiddie, a tween with just enough knowledge to scrabble onto the shoulders of giants. My first forays into software development were via Visual Basic, making AOL "progs" to flood chat rooms and "punt" those bold enough to cross me (interestingly, there's good reason to think Mark Zuckerberg started out the same way).

In 1997, I noticed the local library's catalog computers were running a Telnet client connected to a public IP. I had learned the ins-and-outs of Telnet setting up a MUD server for me and my friends (when I see people play D&D over Discord I always wonder if there'd be a niche for a solid, modern MUD server to fill), so I signed out and then manually brute-forced the password to sign back in. I was looking over my shoulder, half-expecting to get escorted from the building, as if anyone was watching the catalog Telnet server that closely. I don't remember what the password ended up being, only that it was a single-case dictionary word - we were still a few years from a public awareness of password complexity - and I managed to guess it.

Now, with a few years of IT work behind me and a healthy whitehat interest in social engineering, I realize Mitnick probably would've just told a librarian the computer wasn't working and watched her type the password. Regardless, 13-year-old me was proud of his ingenuity. I took my newfound knowledge and used it to check what books were available at which library branch without leaving the house, one time I even put one hold until I could convince my mom to drive me there. Mostly I just enjoyed the thrill that I made it work. I wasn't experienced enough to consider using a proxy (or better yet, to not "hack" from my own computer) so I suppose I'm lucky I knew better than to take on anyone with better security than the local municipal library system. I don't think they ever even bothered to change the password. A few years later, they introduced a public website to do the same thing, because information wants to be free.

That was the aspect of "hacking" that I think has been lost in the intervening years. Hacking now is generally about profit - bitlocking data, demanding ransoms, swiping crypto wallets, harvesting credit card details, running scams, selling password hash tables. When it's not, it's about social activism; whistleblowing, leaking documents. Don't get me wrong, cyberdisruption is a valuable thread in the tapestry of civil disobedience, but Mitnick represented a different breed. He never launched a nuke, the "whistling into the phone" rumor was likely an intentional falsehood, vilification promoted by law enforcement, made plausible by the unusual abilities of a 1960's phreaker named Joybubbles. There was no agenda, no malice; there's not any indication Mitnick ever profited from any of his hacks (directly, at least - certainly the infamy helped his eventual IT security career). It was just an obsession with challenging yourself to accomplish things people assume are impossible, and the satisfaction of the eureka moment when it works. That spirit - so prevalent in hacker communities in the 80's and 90's and the phreaker circles that preceded them - has all but vanished from our public perception of hacking. The terms "hacker" and "hacking" themselves have become almost exclusively negative.

Probably just as well. Who needs more Mark Zuckerbergs?

Kevin Mitnick's business card, featuring a working punch-out lockpicking set

[luckyhyuki]

Whitehate

WHITEHAT BY coffeepot418

SITE: AO3

PAIRING: HAN JISUNG X LEE MINHO

RATING: MATURE

WORD COUNT: 41.7K

“WhiteHat is a community of white hat hackers that take up “bounties” posted on job boards. The bounties consist of finding vulnerabilities in systems and sending a report to the developers. Remember, only hack what you’re given permission to hack! No black hats here.

lix: he was very supportive actually lix: almost suspiciously supportive

hh: minho sus

lk: .

hh: minho hyung sus

lk: better.”