Название: Hacker Culture a to Z: A Fun Guide to the People, Ideas, and Gadgets That Made the Tech World (Final)
Автор: Kim Crawley
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2024
Страниц: 289
Язык: английский
Формат: True PDF, True EPUB/Retail Copy
Размер: 11.5 MB, 10.1 MB

Hacker culture can be esoteric, but this entertaining reference is here to help. Written by longtime cybersecurity researcher and writer Kim Crawley, this fun reference introduces you to key people and companies, fundamental ideas, and milestone films, games, and magazines in the annals of hacking. From airgapping to phreaking to zombie malware, grasping the terminology is crucial to understanding hacker culture and history.

If you're just getting started on your hacker journey, you'll find plenty here to guide your learning and help you understand the references and cultural allusions you come across. More experienced hackers will find historical depth, wry humor, and surprising facts about familiar cultural touchstones.

Computer programming languages can be classified according to how much abstraction they have from a CPU’s instruction set. The most abstracted high-level programming languages are the most human readable and intuitive, such as Perl and Python. Low-level programming languages (assembly languages, by contrast, speak the most directly to the CPU. Most are assembly languages, the most esoteric of programming languages. There are different assembly languages for different types of CPUs.

No computer is 100% secure. The closest we can get is by airgapping: that is, restricting access to a computer’s data as much as possible by not having any connections to any networks whatsoever. Not to the internet, not to any internal networks, not even to any printer devices or network-attached storage. That’s the most literal network-security definition, at any rate.

If you want to do a really proper job, you should physically remove any network interface cards and disable any USB ports and optical drives that aren’t absolutely necessary for the computer’s authorized use. Those aren’t computers, but they are potential cyberattack surfaces: places where a threat actor could send malicious data. Ideally, an airgapped computer should also be in a room protected by excellent physical security, including locked physical doors that require the user to authenticate.

Kali is a Linux-distribution operating system that’s popular with hackers who work as penetration testers. Pentesting, as it’s known, is all about simulating cyberattacks to find security vulnerabilities in computer systems. Defensive cybersecurity specialists then use that information to harden their systems’ security. Kali is open source and can be downloaded for free. Originally Kali was designed for computers with x86/x86-64 architecture Intel or AMD CPUs. But now there are also versions of Kali that can be run on Android devices, Apple Silicon ARM64 devices (including newer MacBooks), and some other devices with ARM CPUs. All of those versions can be directly installed onto the machines or run as a live boot from a USB device, or there are also prebuilt images for virtualization in VMware and VirtualBox. There’s also a Win-KeX interface version of Kali that can be run from Windows Subsystem for Linux.

• Understand the relationship between hacker culture and cybersecurity
• Get to know the ideas behind the hacker ethos, like "knowledge should be free"
• Explore topics and publications central to hacker culture, including 2600 Magazine
• Appreciate the history of cybersecurity
• Learn about key figures in the history of hacker culture
• Understand the difference between hackers and cybercriminals