Intro
People often learn the word “hacking?associated to cybercrimes. Chinese hackers attacked the largest Korean internet portal Naver and stole millions of private users’ sensitive information without getting detected for more than a week. Korean government websites are attacked by unknown hackers from time to time; officials usually claim these are organized cyber-attacks from North Korea. Your Windows-operated PC probably harasses you to intensify protection against viruses and install a firewall, which often annoyingly blocks more programs than you have expected.
The true meaning of a Hacker
So we often associate hacking with breaking the law and assume everyone who engages in hacking is a criminal. And, of course there are people out there who try to sneak into vulnerable e-mail accounts or hijack bank account data. But hacking really isn’t all about that. In fact, the essence of hacking is finding unintended or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem. The rules are simple: anything that works in a computer. Yet, the answer eludes many. There are plenty of programmers and software developers who answer the problem right away, but this is not what hackers are interested in. Hackers strive to solve problems in counterintuitive ways and find solutions that are unimaginable for those confined to conventional thinking and methodologies. Hidden answers where normal people pass by or a short, but elegant solution to a seemingly difficult computer issue is what hackers look for. Hackers are somewhat similar to physicists and mathematicians who are entirely committed to discovering universal explanations of the universe. Hackers do the same thing in computers.
How Hacking works
Now a curious engineer might ask the main question: “How does hacking work anyway?” Actually this was the question I had before I became engaged in hacking, and it is the question that fascinates me still. In fact, every program has an unintentional weakness, which is often caused by a careless programmer’s mistake. The vulnerability can be exploited in a way that a program can behave completely different. An MP3 player may turn into a network sniffer that may hijack all the data you transmit through the internet. Or, it could even send Windows users’ account password to the attacker’s e-mail so that the attacker may completely own the entire control a victim’s computer. To find the exploitable vulnerability on the first hand, a hacker needs to reverse engineer a program, which is a tedious and time consuming job since it is as difficult as guessing the blueprint of a car just by disassembling it piece by piece. It may seem impossible at a glance, but a smart hacker would only inspect the location where the program gets the input from the user because the first step of exploitation is to somehow make the program swallow the wrong input file, which contains harmful attack codes. Hackers spend so much time to ease the disassembling process, and they have been quite successful: iPhone, Android and Playstation have been hacked.
PLUS
POSTECH has a student organization called PLUS which stands for Postech Laboratory for Unix Security. To keep up with the latest security issues and more sophisticated hacking techniques, we individually study different areas of computer security and hold a seminar to share knowledge. Security is not the only interest. Anything related to advanced- programming could be the topic of a seminar. By exploring various areas of computer science, we practice the true spirit of a hacker.