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CRACKDOWN

steal money are unjustifiable. Virus writers are electronic vandals; hackers who rob are high-tech thieves.

The difference between the good and the bad is often blurred. The distinction is one of motive: the malicious and the criminal should be viewed differently from the merely clever or curious.

Some day it may be possible to get a clearer picture of what the activities of the computer underground costs industry and telecom companies. Present estimates vary so widely as to be worthless. Figures are seemingly plucked from the air: it is utterly impossible to verify whether the true cost in the US is around $550 million each year (the ComputerWorld estimate), or whether corporations in the UK and the US lose £2 billion (about $3.5 billion) annually to computer criminals, or whether total losses actually amount to as much as $5 billion (as was estimated at a security conference in 1991). These exaggerations are compounded by the verbosity of the hackers themselves - who are only too willing to embellish their abilities and skills. Hacking has been romanticized, and it can be forgotten that cracking a system requires as much persistence as skill. With both sides expounding fanciful stories and ever wilder claims, truth is lost in the telling.

What is ironic is that the activities of the hackers is leading to a situation they would decry. Security managers have a clear responsibility to protect their sites from electronic intrusion. As hackers become bolder, security is becoming tightened, threatening the very ‘freedom of information’ that hacking, in its benign form, is said to promote.

Hackers are an engaging bunch, even the ‘bad’ ones: bright, curious, technically gifted, prone to harmless embellishment, and more than a little obsessed. They are usually creative, probing, impatient with rules and restrictions. In character, they closely resemble the first-generation hackers.

Computing has always gained from the activities of those who look beyond what is there, to think of what there might be. The final irony for the computer industry is that the hackers who are being shut out today will be the programmers, managers and even security experts of tomorrow.

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