Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.

In a chilling article entitled Big Brother is Watching Bob Sullivan of MSNBC recounts a tale during a recent visit to London: Only moments after stepping into the Webshack Internet cafe in London's Soho neighborhood, "Mark" asked me what I thought of George W. Bush and Al Gore. "I wouldn't want Bush running things," he said. "Because he can't run his Web site." Then he showed me a variety of ways t

Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security. The purpose of having a logon process is to establish who you are. Once the operating system knows who you are, it can grant or deny requests for system resources appropriately. If a bad guy learns your password, he can log on as you. In fact, as far as the operating system is concerned, he is you. Whatever you can do on the system, he can do as well, because he's you. Maybe he wants to read sensitive information you've stored on your computer, like your email. Maybe you have more privileges on the network than he does, and being you will let him do things he normally couldn't. Or maybe he just wants to do something malicious and blame it on you. In any case, it's worth protecting your credentials.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore. It's an unfortunate fact of computer science: when a computer program runs, it will do what it's programmed to do, even if it's programmed to be harmful. When you choose to run a program, you are making a decision to turn over control of your computer to it. That's why it's important to never run, or even download, a program from an untrusted source - and by "source", I mean the person who wrote it, not the person who gave it to you.

So-called "2600" clubs are a kind of hacker "boy scout" organization - there are local 2600 chapters all around the globe. It is in this environment, and this mindset, that London's hackers do their work. They do not analyze computer systems and learn how to break them out of spite, or some childish need to destroy: Mark and friends see themselves as merely accumulating knowledge that could be used in self-defense if necessary. They are the citizen's militia, the Freedom Fighters of the Information Age, trying to stay one step ahead of technology that could one day be turned against them.

Jon-K Adams in his treatise entitled Hacker Ideology (aka Hacking Freedom) states that hackers have been called both techno-revolutionaries and heroes of the computer revolution. Hacking "has become a cultural icon about decentralized power." But for all that, hackers are reluctant rebels. They prefer to fight with code than with words. And they would rather appear on the net than at a news conference. Status in the hacker world cannot be granted by the general public: it takes a hacker to know and appreciate a hacker. That's part of the hacker's revolutionary reluctance; the other part is the news media's slant toward sensationalism, such as, "A CYBERSPACE DRAGNET SNARED FUGITIVE HACKER." The public tends to think of hacking as synonymous with computer crime, with breaking into computers and stealing and destroying valuable data. As a result of this tabloid mentality, the hacker attempts to fade into the digital world, where he-and it is almost always he-has a place if not a!

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

S He could make a duplicate of your hard drive and take it back his lair. Once there, he'd have all the time in the world to conduct brute-force attacks, such as trying every possible logon password. Programs are available to automate this and, given enough time, it's almost certain that he would succeed. Once that happens, Laws #1 and #2 above apply

Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key. Suppose you installed the biggest, strongest, most secure lock in the world on your front door, but you put the key under the front door mat. It wouldn't really matter how strong the lock is, would it? The critical factor would be the poor way the key was protected, because if a burglar could find it, he'd have everything he needed to open the lock. Encrypted data works the same way - no matter how strong the cryptoalgorithm is, the data is only as safe as the key that can decrypt it.

The solution is to recognize two essential points. First, security consists of both

Some common words found in the essay are:
System A's, Microsoft's Web, System Windows, Ben Franklin, Jargon File, Pretty Privacy, Bush's Web, Penned China, FUGITIVE HACKER, Hacking Freedom, web site, bad guy, operating system, web sites, computer systems, virus scanner, hard drive, march 2001, computer it's computer, it's computer anymore, bad guys, hacker ethic, credit card information, ignorant enemy yourself, 9 march 2001,
Approximate Word count = 5599
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page double spaced)