SXSW: The Hacker You Think You Know Doesn't Exist

(Above: Trailer for The Net. Never forget.)

From The Net to Swordfish to Live Free Or Die Hard, Hollywood loves its hackers, and has built a handy stereotype about them: Hackers are overwhelmingly white males who are immature, socially awkward, alienated, vindictive, have personality problems, and are motivated by selfish goals. That's according to Molly Sauter, a researcher at MIT?s Center for Media, who held a South by Southwest panel called, "Policy Effects of Media Portrayals of Hacktivists."

The plots of Hollywood films focus on technology paranoia and insider threats, where hackers are technologically powerful and everyone else is technologically powerless. Those tropes show up in the news media, too, Sauter said. "All the hackers are superusers. They can use technology that other people can?t even fathom. [Their methods and the tech they use are] impossible to understand and are therefore impossible to defend against."

News about hackers is wildly misreported. "Any crime that involves a computer involves a hacker," Sauter said. For example, when David Kernell accessed Sarah Palin?s email, it was widely reported as a hacking job. But, Sauter said, "he got access by finding the answers to her security questions on Wikipedia. This doesn?t correspond with the image of the hacker as superuser. Anyone could do this."

Often, coverage confuses what could happen with what has happened. Sauter pointed to a story from a security conference about a theoretical weakness in insulin pumps, which turned into headlines such as "Black hat hacker can remotely attack insulin pumps and kill people." Another example: When a water pump in Illinois was turning on and off repeatedly, and then burned out, it was reported that is was a SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) attack by the Russians. "It was actually a contractor remoting in from vacation in Russia," Sauter said. "And the pump burned out because sometimes that happens." Similarly, a blackout in Brazil that was reported to be a SCADA attack was actually caused by sooty insulators. But the corrections rarely travel as far as the original story.

The result of this portrayal of hackers is that hackers have become the target of computer criminal legislation, and hackers are the justification for laws that are passed. Consider the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in the mid-90s and has been amended six times since then. Sauter said the law is too broad, and targets the elements of the crime rather than the result, harm, intent or attendant circumstances of a crime. The law also has vague wording; for example, it prohibits accessing a protected computer without authorization, but access and authorization aren?t defined. And these issues have wide-reaching implications not just for true hackers, but for regular people, too.

SCADA attacks, of course, are a very serious threat. But, Sauter said, it?s important to remember that "the media metaphor of the hacker doesn?t exist. A character has been created, and that is the character everybody is reacting to."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/sxsw-the-hacker-you-think-you-know-doesnt-exist-7383357?src=rss

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