AGENTS OF A HOSTILE POWER - HACKING ETHICS by unknown
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It is worth remembering that, although we do not cause damage
to the systems we hack, what we do is still illegal. Our main
aim is to satisfy our desire to hack and this co-exists with
our aim of helping the system administrator secure his system
against possible future attacks by the sort cyber-vandals who
have managed to give hackers a bad name, by crashing systems,
violating people's privacy and generally causing trouble. The
closest we come to this sort of thing is when the machine we
hack is a web server, in which case, we will often leave our
"calling card" - a small image of an ace of spades - at the
bottom of the page, linked to a hidden page with information
about AoHP. One of our primary aims is to dispel the myth
perpetuated by the media that all hackers are bad. Our name
comes from an interview given by John Austen, then the
Detective Inspector in charge of Scotland Yard's Computer
Crime Unit, who expressed fears that "Gullible young hackers
could be taken advantage of by agents of a hostile power."
One of our aims is to influence gullible young hackers who
might otherwise fall into the trap of hacking into some
serious site using some script they've downloaded from the
Net that exploits some bug that allows them root access,
boasting about it online or to their friends and getting
busted by the FBI and touted as a major threat to national
security.
We feel that we define ethical hacking and we would like to
think that a system administrator, when asked "If you were
going to be hacked - didn't have a choice in the matter -
who would you prefer to be hacked by?", would reply "The
Agents of a Hostile Power."
More and more, we are seeing hackers being captured and
claiming that they did not intend to cause harm to the
systems they had hacked and that they were only doing it
for the challenge and so on. To these people, we would say
this: If this is true, then adopt our policies of not
altering the system by installing backdoors and of only
using true hacking techniques - ie. avoiding password
sniffers. Most importantly, alert the system administrator
to the fact that his systems security is flawed, and let
him know what steps he needs to take to fix this. Only
then can you claim that your intentions were honourable or
ethical as opposed to malicious.
We know that what we do is illegal and, if any of us were
to be captured, we would accept this fact, admit that we
knew what we were doing was wrong, and face the music. For
us, hacking is an intellectual challenge, not something to
boast about to our peers (particularly as none of us are
teenagers).Hacking isn't about impressing our friends. We
don't want fame. We're ethical hackers and although it may
sound corny, we have our honour and our code.
That's all we need.
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