: Re: How do I write a computer-savvy/hacker character? I have a character in my story for whom being computer savvy is supposed to be a major personality trait. The character works with computers

@Rivera824

Vote Up Vote Down

Suppose you needed money to run an organized crime ring. Would you get the money by hacking into a bank's network and wiring yourself cash? No! Not only is that extremely difficult to do, but you're almost guaranteed to get prosecuted because the bank will track you down.

So, it's very very rare for hackers to infiltrate high profile networks. They always go for the low hanging fruit first.

Suppose a small 12-room hotel in the middle of nowhere keeps their guest information in a Google Doc, and the owner accidentally enabled global sharing. A hacker would eat that up in a heartbeat. Or, suppose another small business registered their domain name with GoDaddy and didn't use a secure password. Now, it's just a simple matter of logging in and editing the DNS entries. I can redirect traffic to the wrong server and grab credit card numbers whenever anyone orders. Easy peasy.

My point is that the vast majority of hacking operations are very small-scale.

Movies make hackers do big-scale operations... but why on earth would you break into an armored fortress when the guy down the street doesn't lock his doors?

So, if you want to make your novel realistic, your hackers should try to find ways around super secure networks, rather than breaking in.

Suppose I want to steal social security numbers. If this was a movie, I'd hack into the IRS's supper secure network and pull up tax returns.

But that's too much work!!

Easier: Hack into TurboTax's website.

No, that's also too hard.

There's a security vulnerability in older versions of Internet Explorer that will let me do a buffer overflow and essentially track data sent over the device for the remainder of the browser session. So, I'll steal social security numbers of everyone using old browsers.

Hackers usually go for the weakest link.

These are all black-hat examples, but I could just as easily list their white-hat counterparts... like scanning GoDaddy accounts for weak passwords and changing them to more secure ones. (This would protect these people from becoming easy victims of the black-hats)

(0)

Login to post a comment!