From: mitch_hurrison at ziplip.com (mitch_hurrison@...lip.com)
Subject: OT: An odd question that has arrisen within my household

Hi Henry,

I have to agree with Josh on this one. Basically you admit
to not having any first-hand experience with the real
"underground". This shows from your comments.

There are alot of lowkey collaborations of people who
research and exploit vulnerabilities for the pure joy
of solving the puzzle. And that feel no further obligation
to the "community" at large. Then there are those who
research and exploit vulnerabilities to, oh no, hack
systems. It amuses me that alot of people refuse to
accept that intelligent people don't always seek the
limelight. That for alot of us hacking is still about
having fun with your friends and mental stimulation. People
that aren't out to make the world a better place or make
a bundle in the info-sec industry.  

It's the inherit arrogance of full disclosure that assumes
that the one to bring it to the public's eye is the one
to have first found the issue. This is a limited view.

To assume people can only learn via publicly available
information is to take the availability of this information
as a given. You are assuming that the information posted
is the only way someone else can learn. How do you think
these techniques were developed in the first place? When you
force people to be creative by not providing them with
set answers, that's when real innovation is born. Small
example: the get_sp function exploits even today are using. Just
because aleph1 used it in the mother of all leaks. And
even though using such a guessing methodology is complete
nonsense on local stack overflow exploits, people are still 
using it because full disclosure claimed it was the way it
should be done.   

There are close-knit collaborations of private research teams. And
that is where the true knowledge lies. A place that is
one step up the foodchain. For someone to "fully disclose"
something they first have to aquire that very something.
Saddly most of the full disclosure we see today is the result of someone
being sloppy with private research. So people like HD Moore can
wrap their ethereal dump in some perl and present the world
with yet another worm-threat.

With regards,
Mitch 

> henry j. mason hmason@...inet.com 
> Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:37:09 -0400 
>
> i agree with your assessment, basically, but:
> you say these 'uber-hackers' don't believe in full-
> disclosure, but you say they use it to learn? or,
> without full-disclosure (or any disclosure at all)
> they would learn anyway? care to posit some theories
> as to how?
> these people have tons of free time, yet a lot going
> on socially? i find those two mutually exclusive,
> unless you don't have a job, and job-less twenty-
> somethings are hardly the most motivated of people.
> i do grant you that there is a very small quiet minority
> of very skilled hackers. but they aren't t13r anything
> because they just do it because they have to, not for
> l33t recognition.
> henry
>

> Joshua Levitsky wrote:
> I would add a tier before Tier I that would be hackers that do not 
> believe in full disclosure, do not share exploits outside their close 
> knit circle of friends, do not support "the man". A lot of these guys 
> are better than "The best of the best", but nobody knows because they 
> don't make themselves public. Maybe you could call it "T13r Z3r0" :) 
> Seriously... there are people out there that have tons of free time to 
> learn, and possibly monitor lists like this, and laugh at the silly 
> people that disclose vulnerabilities and share information. They aren't 
> necessarily out doing damage. They just don't play with strangers 
> because they choose not to. Some of these people are damn cool. Some are 
> just anti-social, but that really isn't the norm so far as I can tell. 
> Of the people I've ever met they seem to have personalities, and usually 
> have more going on than I do socially. If you met them you wouldn't 
> think "hacker" or even know they are in to computers.
> 
> I dunno... just my observations here in New York City. Perhaps it's 
> different elsewhere.
> 
> -Josh
> 
> 
> On Oct 13, 2003, at 1:02 AM, Joel R. Helgeson wrote:
> 
>> Tier I
>> - The best of the best
>> - Ability to find new vulnerabilities
>> - Ability to write exploit code and tools
>>
>> Tier II
>> - IT savvy
>> - Ability to program or script
>> - Understand wht the vulnerability is and how it works
>> - Intelligent enough to use the exploit code and tools with precision
>>
>> Tier III
>> - "Script Kiddies"
>> - Inexpert
>> - Ability to download exploit code and tools
>> - Very little understanding of the actual vulnerability (launching Linux
>> attacks against MS boxes)
>> - Randomly fire off scripts until something works
> 
> 
> -- 
> Joshua Levitsky, CISSP, MCSE
> System Engineer
> AOL Time Warner
> [5957 F27C 9C71 E9A7 274A  0447 C9B9 75A4 9B41 D4D1]
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
> Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
> 

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