Like most people, I am just the end user of a computer which is much like someone driving a car. I can operate it to go where I want to go, but I don’t know much about what's going on under the hood. I would like to change that. My ultimate goal now is to know more about hacking. I have no intention of malice yet I’m curious about how it works but I don’t know where to start. I Googled the subject but I’m afraid to click on some of it lest I be hacked myself. Others here I can tell are more knowledgeable than myself, so if you can, steer me in the direction I should go.
I've been thinking about this. I used to subscribe to a magazine called Hackers Quarterly 2600. "Hacking" exists in lots of arenas, not just computers over the internet. Since no one else has responded, I'll chuck some stuff out and others can amend or correct. This is just me spitballing. I think Beth Gallagher worked in this field. The original Hacker is thought to be the person who learned to spoof those phone services you would subscribe to back in the day so as to get discounted long distance calls. You called the service, punched in your code on the dial pad, dialed your long distance number, and the discounted call was made through that service. Some enterprising (or bored) person discovered that blowing the free whistle you got in a box of Cap'n Crunch Cereal into the phone would spoof the system and bypass the pass code so as to make long distance calls without paying for a subscription. The whistle's tone was at 2,600hz, hence the name "Hackers Quarterly 2600." (I love that story.) I read an article in one issue where someone figured out how to spoof the cash payment portion of Walmart's self-checkout system so it would not charge you for your order and would then puke out a $20 bill. I gotta say that at the time I used to read a lot of magazines about a bunch of different stuff, and only read this magazine out of intellectual curiosity. I am not smart enough to implement any of this stuff, and I don't need the $20 I might have been able to steal from Walmart badly enough to break the law. But the stories and the different things that get hacked and the ways they get hacked made for a very interesting read, as did some of the readers' letters. I have no idea how they avoided lawsuits. I guess a hacker is any non-authorized person who gains access to a computer or to a system or anything where breaking & entering (on various levels) is done by bypassing electronic protections, where the hacker may or may not do harm beyond being invasive. So "hacking" encompasses lots of stuff. My understanding of the computer stuff is that our systems are exposed to the outside world via the internet. Think about all the software you have installed on your computer that knows to tell you that an update is available via a pop-up notification. Most every software company's computer has access to your system to check the current version and to let you know that an update is available, and to then give you one-click access to download it. You don't search for it, and you do not seek out the address to get the update...it's done over the web by others. Businesses have similar access exposure to the outside world if their computers have internet visibility anywhere on the network. The hacker you are thinking of accesses computers via the web from their own computer anywhere in the world, and figures out how to get past the security measures so as to gain the same access to those systems that any authorized user has (that would be you & me on home PCs, or in the case of a corporate PC the hacker can do whatever a finance guy can do or the payroll guy can do or an IT guy can do or just about any other employee.) So the hacker can: -get access to your banking information, pictures, documents or anything else you have on your PC -process fraudulent transactions in a business system, to include banking transactions -steal proprietary business information (corporate spy stuff) -infect the system with a virus so as to bring it down (maybe Greenpeace wants to punish Star Kist) -install "ransomeware" so that the systems are locked up, and restore control when a ransom is paid -hack into ultra-secured systems merely for bragging rights and/or to harm the entity's reputation If you want to read more, I gotta think that you could safely look up "hacking" on Wiki. After that I'm not certain. Now you got me afraid to go searching
Wellllll, I am not smart enough to hack, as I said I have 12:00 still flashing on my vcr. But today I was browsing for a 26h Kawasaki engine to put in my JD tractor. There was a site that had it for $1000+ less than anywhere else. I started checking reviews. The fact that it had instructions for payment on a separate page including wire transfer info sort of gave me a heads up. The BBB says this kind of fraud is the fastest growing in the country. So if Ed hurries, he can get in on the ground floor.
I have been hacked as of yesterday. Will try and find out where to go from here.. today. Once all clear and have things under control will get back with you all. A nightmare to say the least.
Wow, bad news ! Can you share what happened ? Keep us updated and hoping that you can get everything straightened out fast.
One useful thing I read some years ago about buying online: Never use a debit card, only credit cards. The reasons are that if you use a debit card, the money is taken from your account immediately. If there is fraud involved, you have to get the money back. Using a credit card, you have time to dispute it before paying. And, as of a few years ago anyway, you generally have no liability with CC fraud; although there could be a max of $50 charge, probably depending on your CC company. Twenty some years ago somebody charged a couple hundred bucks on my card for fuel, restaurants, etc. in CA. I called the CC and told them I'd never been in CA my entire life. That was the end of it, never heard from my CC again, charges were taken off.
I had my bank account drained because I stupidly used my debit card once. Kind of a long story, I was on top of it that very day, the branch manager dropped the ball and never contacted Fraud to stop the transactions, the guy got away with it. I was covered for the loss.
Yeh, the terms of the debit card had me covered. I usually got cash on Saturdays and made it last all week, but for some reason that week was different. I went to get cash on a Wednesday evening and the ATM said Insufficient Balance. I went home, logged onto my account, and could see the withdrawals of $500, $500, then another $500 was declined so the amounts got lower until the bucks had been sucked out. This all happened after banking hours, so the transactions had not posted. I was at the bank at 9AM the next morning with my nose pressed against the glass when they opened and filed a report with the branch manager. I told her to put a stop on those transactions because they had not posted yet. A few weeks later I got a call from their Fraud Department asking if those were my transactions, because their system picked them up as being abnormal. I asked why were they calling me, since the incident had already been reported. They had no record of such a report, and it turns out that the [new] branch manager had no idea how to process the report, so it just sat in her desk gathering dust. I forget why I had used that debit card. It was certainly not normal for me to do so.