ldt010: It Needs to be Said
#010 - [ It Needs to be Said ] [ jarvis ]
All of the lil txts i put five minutes of my time into for this zine prior to this were my personal opinion, but the following are just simple facts. Feel free to neglect that they are fact but recognize that you are probably doing so for one of two reasons:
- i am talking about you and you are in denial
- you don't understand or have the time to care about what i am about to say and you'd rather look at it as my ego speaking.
I speak not only for myself, I speak for friends, enemies, and others unknown to me who have been hurt by what I am about to describe. Some people in the current security industry could probably be compared to Sean Puffy Combs who writes re-does other people's music and makes money off of it. Others are even more clueless and simply out to make a name for themselves amoung friends because they lack the small amount of skill that it actually takes to be a complete poser in this industry. Are you the guy in some remote dorm showing your girlfriend how you can use a sniffer to read her email or sniff her passwords? If so, can you tell me how the sniffer works? Can you tell me, or even begin to elaborate, on the system call the sniffer users to put the ethernet card into promisc mode? Do you feel proud of what you are doing ? If the network in question is switched, do you understand what goes on in order for everything to work properly? Do you consider yourself a 'hacker' or 'security inclined' individual because you were able to use someone else's software that you couldn't even begin to understand to sniff a network? That was just one example. The clueless, harmless, guy who is 'learning' security or pretending to have some level of clue by performing such a simple task. Who really cares? Just another nmap-happy lamer; annoying, but not quite as bad as the second type I will describe.
Before I do that, let me just cover a few other things first.. Although the type I just described above is harmless in his lack of knowledge, is it right that someone like him should get a job in the security industry.. using other people's tools, none of which he could begin to write himself, to penetrate networks for money? Some of the people who code this shit are living in poverty in poland or some other shit country where there are no jobs like they have in the US, yet this 'security expert' is out making money using their software to perform simple attacks on remote networks.
The second type has hurt me directly, fortunately not as much as he has my friends (hi digit! remember back in hax years ago when u were gonna quit irc because the second exploit of yours that got leaked to bugtraq? heh. look at things now, man. heh. you're still somewhere on irc, though... now with antisec :> keep it real). The second types are those who take the work of others, an exploit someone wrote, and paste it to bugtraq or pass it around to their friends. I never thought it would happen to me, but it did well over a year ago. It was ironic. I had written the exploit in question sometime around the summer of '99. Actually, I ported it from x86 to sparc and I guess it was being used by sufficient # of people to locally compromise solaris 2.6/2.7 sparc boxes. heh. Anyway, the thing that made this so fucking insane was that my friend digit's lpset x86 exploit (I DIDNT PORT THIS EXPLOIT, I PORTED AN LPSET EXPLOIT FOR A DIFFERENT BUG IN THE -a ARG) got posted to bugtraq, and then this 'security expert' posted MY exploit for a completely different bug in reference to the same thread! The 'security expert' in question removed my comments and tried to make comments on the exploit that made it look like he did it. The attempt he made was feeble (see this url: www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/91/2000/4/0/3656045/) , so DiGiT wrote in and flamed him for releasing my code and thinking it was a ported exploit for his (digit's) bug, when it was an older one. Anyway, the 'security expert' came out looking like the idiot he truely was. I got attacked by a cluebie, but many times people will change the exploit around and put in there names, and send it to bugtraq or simply just rename variables in the program,etc, and put there name on it and claim to have invented the concept then at the end of the exploit write "AVAILABLE FOR WORK IN THE SECURITY INDUSTRY". i hate this. A couple weeks ago scut's telnetd got leaked to bugtraq by some fag and now the internet is being c0mpr0m1zed by kiddies, all for the sake of the person who realeased the exploit's fame. These 'security experts' talk too much (I don't care if you are some nmap kiddy with a job pen-testing, or someone releasing code) and the fucked up thing is they will use the phrase "script kid".
Ever wonder where "script kid" came from? Well let me clue you in. Back in the summer of '98 a member of h4g1s (aka RoTshB) released their named exploit to bugtraq in order to fuck with the bugtraq community, and possibly because ADM also coded a named exploit after h4g1s and h4g1s may have figured ADM was going to release or it would get out... Anyway, in that post the member of h4g1s in question said "enjoy, script kids" or something to that effect and he also insulted the whole 'bugtraq reading community' -- a nice move! After that, a while later, h4g1s defaced slashdot (*giggle*)... If you looked through the posts on slashdot after the defacement, the entire lame "linux is cool. HEH." college 'i talk too much community' had the nerve to call h4g1s 'script kids'. I wonder if they will ever realize how stupid that comment was. WHO BROUGHT THE TERM TO PUBLIC ATTENTION? These slashdot loving kids don't have a right to use such a phrase and do not have a right to say who is and who isn't a 'script kid'... They are eager to use canned words and opinions and are too naive to the subject matter they are talking about to deem whether or not it is appropriate. Things are different now, there are more script kids defacing stuff, and nobody with any level of skill does any defacement these days (as far as i know). Any 'security expert' with a remote clue could tell you that all this hype just helps some parts of the industry, and shields the public eye from what people with real skill are doing (not a bad thing). I could go on and on for hours, but I will just cut this short with one last thought. Whichever type you are, you probably can't change and it is doubtful that you want to. Most _REAL_ bugs left over are not your simple, standard, buffer overflow and even if they are do you really think you would take the time to get everything just right, know what to look for in the registers, and then figure out how to change your exploit to make it work? Do you even have the time to grasp simple things like what you put into the buffer, in what order, etc ? I dare you to try, but since you won't and if you do you probably won't get far, do yourself a favour and just go away, do something else,etc. You probably don't have a right to run exploits that you couldn't figure out how to re-write yourself, and you definitely don't have the right to run something you can't understand!
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Long Dark Tunnel 2001. - http://ldt.aguk.co.uk - ldt@hushmail.com
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