Scream At The PC

A hacker is often considered a very dangerous fellow, one who is malicious and  wants to exploit every electronic system that he can for either financial or personal gain. There is a flipside to this coin though…

A hacker is an artist who wants others to appreciate his work, whether it be through unscrupulous methods of creating worms, backdoors and SQL injections or through less disruptive measures like emailing you a descriptive memo on how to improve your unsecure network.

It is early on a saturday morning, your role is that of journalist – you have just had your third cup of coffee after having had stayed up all through the night. You have been working on a story for publication to the local newspaper, which you need to send in for proof reading to your editor. The thing is that somehow everytime you print your document there appears a picture of a skull and cross bones – you scan your computer for a virus yet again, which calmly tells you that there isn’t one? So what is your next step, you need to get this to the editor’s desk as soon as possible so that you can get your slice of free-lance pocket money that you desperately need to pay the bills… Who do you call at this hour, it is three in the morning? You end up googling for your answer only to be met with a whole page full of skull and crossbones… and then on your screen a dialog box opens up and the words “You have been owned!” wirng through your ears and the fear that there is nothing you can so about it. Then while you are thinking through your next courses of action, your 16 year old son comes down the stairs to fetch something to eat. Seeing your predicament, he calmly walks up to your machine – pulls out the network cable, opens a command prompt, fingers fly across the keyboard, closes everything -plugs back in the network cable and says good morning to you…

Your 16 year old just saved you… or was he the one who was messing around with you in the first place? Either way you are greatful and are determined to hire your son as your personal anti-hacker and are willing to let your son teach you better security on your computer.

Needless to say – there are hackers out there, not all are bad – however most aren’t on your side… get a few on your side and you may not fall victim as easily

Some will ask, this is all very well said – but what did the 16 year old son do to get the hacker off the system? In short he re-configured my firewall by closing unecessary ports, made my admin password more secure and then re-configured my IPsec to be much more secure… every process now requires an access token to be verified which can only be initiated by you “the journalist”