Tuesday 31 December 1996: “Hacker ‘crowbar’ released on Net” # Daily Telegraph #security #crack

I sometimes wonder how far we’ve actually come:

Scan 1

The security world in general still whinges about full-disclosure – especially when it keeps you up until 3am and/or away from your family; I believe the preponderance of tools – nessus, metasploit, nmap, sqlmap, skipfish, wpscan, … – is a message and it tells us that more tools, more openly available, with less zero-day horse-trading is good for the internet marketplace. Occasionally it’s bad for specific internet entities, but rarely fatal.

But the media, and the government cyberspooks? They still have a vested interest in presenting tools (and security knowledge) as arcane and possibly worthy of restriction.

That’s not a perspective which is healthy for the internet. It was not back then, is still is not, now.

One thought on “Tuesday 31 December 1996: “Hacker ‘crowbar’ released on Net” # Daily Telegraph #security #crack

  1. alecm Post author

    A couple of weeks later the Grauniad posted my side of the story; I don’t know whether I have a copy of that, unfortunately

    Reply