So over been reading for about 10 min now on the hacking part of the site. I see everyone flaming script kitties about ddos. And screwing with school networks and computers. With ddos people are saying it's illegal and asking in a public forum is asking for jail. My question is ... isn't it illegal to hack people's routers using software like backtackr To Gain Free internet acsess? Didn't see anyone flame him so I'm guessing not? Kinda always wanted to try it but I prefer not to be anyone's jail bitch llol
Are you asking if the hacking forum here is illigal? People may do illigal things but talking about hacking is not illigal. There are plenty of legit uses for hacking skills such as learning how to defend against malicious attacks or maybe hacking into a customers computer that they happend to forget the password too. You don't people from doing illigal hacking by preventing people from talking about it.
I broke into a friends router because they didn't know their WEP key, they watched and I kind of got that "I'm watching you" look, I didn't feel like finding the router and reading the small print.
Another friend, I told them they should switch to WPA2 because he was still on WEP and I was trying to explain how fast you can break into WEP. So he says something like "I'm good I've got 128 bit" so I broke into his router to prove my point.
my first example is perfectly fine, I was given permission to break in, the second one is a little questionable. Breaking into a neighbors router and stealing their connection, that's definitely a no-no.
Woah guys. I know there are legitamate reasons for hacking. They call it white-hat hacking.
My question was simply if hacking routers were illegal in the context of leaching internet access from them.
Anything is legal if given permission from the owner I understand that :)
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
actually none of that is illegal
its just asinine and immature for the people doing it
It really bugs me when people don't know the difference between hacking and cracking.
And if you don't, then read this.
Pfff. Hacking, Cracking. It's all the same.
Well im sorry Teebler... Not all of us can be competent like yourself.
Some of us are more knowledgable in some areas of computing then others. its normal.
Im ignorant when it comes to hacking / cracking (w.e you want to call it).
Penetration testing is a perfectly legitimate job, hacking is only illegal if you don't have permission. Script kiddies are flamed because they do black hat stuff without even knowing what they're doing. ddos'ing is stupid, useless, and illegal (unless you have permission but nobody is going to give you permission to take down their server)
Cracking routers can be perfectly legit, I cracked my own router several times with some commonly used wordlists and built my own wordlist to try to crack my router to test it's security. It's my router, I can do with it as I see fit. If a friend were to ask me to crack their router password to see how easy it is, I would, and it would be legal to do so because I have permission. ddos'ing and defacing are dumb and have no possible good intentions about them. The sad truth is, most skids don't get jail time (mainly because they don't hack anything important) and in all reality there isn't much danger in it. If you fake your mac and don't do anything that could be tied back to you, there's not much danger in stealing internet either. Is it right? no. Is it good? no. But it happens. White hats only exist because black hats will always be around to do stupid little skid crap, and because there's a few real hackers with malicious intentions, but those are few and far between.
^ this
also here's some hot ferret action
[img]http://i.imgur.com/0z7pboO.gif[/img]
Thanks for the info guys. :)
ghostxwalking pretty much just said everything that needed to be said. +1
The legality is not so much the question, because there are tons of countries that simply don't have any legislation against even the worst hacking. For many internet users, hacking in servers and stealing software and data is just an easy and in their country legal way to get stuff or make money. Western governments still act like the internet is theirs, well, the more they regulate, the less it will be theirs. As soon as they understand that, a lot of problems and misconceptions will be gone. In the mean time, the Chinese, Indians and Nigerians will learn more about technology then the Westerners, because they can get in trouble for trying to learn something.
I personally don't see any need for special legislation in regards to the internet or data comminucation in general, stealing is stealing, whatever means are used, there is no difference between using counterfit keys to open a locked door of a house and using dedicated software to crack a password of a password protected server or router or networking device. Just like it is perfectly legal to have a business in replicating doorkeys, it's also perfectly legal and respectable to have a business in replicating software keys, but still, in the software world, the legislation is medieval, it's the fact of being a locksmith that is made illegal, not the fact of being the thief. The thief is the one that takes something from someone else and causes harm or prejudice, not the one that makes the key. So if someone steal something via the internet, it's just like stealing it through a window of a house, so it's theft, and there have been laws against theft for ages, why do we need new ones? In fact, these new laws have only accomplished one thing: they have miseducated the governments mercenaries and enforcers about their mission, which has lead to horrendous errors in judgement and behaviour. The only useful legislation concerning data communication should be that the internet is free for all and that noone can be prevented from using the internet, and that companies that make people pay for access to the internet, should provide real services, should not ask more money than the real economic value of those services, should guarantee the connection to the internet at all time, and should be heavily punished if they manipulate the datastream, throttle or cap the bandwidth, analyse the datastream, capture the datastream even for caching, or hijack the datastream.
There is still a very long way to go, and in the mean time there will be many innocents burned at the stake, while the guilty remain untouched. That's just the way it goes, history and intelligence have never been adopted as teachers by those in power. In fact, politicians are not concerned at all about public safety or protection of property for citizens, they are only concerned about information flow, about losing the control they exert by manipulation information. They are not going after the mobs and fences that steal and sell property of citizens in an organised manner, like banks or social websites or whatever, they are going after those that criticize, the sceptics with an opinion of their own.
So in the Western world, an ISP can hijack your computer if they detect torrent activity (like what if you're downloading a linux distro, do they differentiate, well if it's like in Belgium for instance, they do not, when you download a linux distro from an official source via torrents, you'll be throttled by the ISP at 1 kbit/s or so, or in France, where you'll get a strike for torrenting an official linux distro). In my view, that is a much greater crime than hacking into a company server without actually stealing anything or sabotaging anything, because just hacking because of intellectual interest is exerting the right to self-development or even other rights (for instance who in their right mind would pay a company to make him/her a secure server without at least having a go at that companies own server to see if they know what they are doing? Isn't that the same thing as performing crashtest before selling cars?). In that case, there is no harm done, it's trespassing at most, and when it's a business, their servers are their stores, so it's like walking into the staff room at a store, if there is nothing stolen, no harm done, there is no reason to get all wound up, it's not like you're sneaking into some private person's home (which is what closed software companies and social websites and banks etc do). On the other hand, if you lock someone from the internet, you are effectively shutting him up from access to the main instrument of freedom of speech, which is a fundamental right violation and a horrendous crime. With what the internet has become, blocking someone from freely accessing the internet is like throwing someone in jail, removing him from society.
All of this notwithstanding the fact that an ISP should have no right to look at one's datastream in a differentiated fashion, because that's eavesdropping. So for instance, if I'm a civil servant or soldier in country A, and a customer with an ISP that is a foreign company or majority-owned by foreign shareholders, and the ISP is analysing the data traffic of the customers in country A, that would be espionage wouldn't it? Whereas, when someone posts a video on the Internet that proves horrendous war crimes that were committed out in the open, how is that different from a journalist that publishes images from a security camera posted in a public place?
Hacking is not a crime, talking about hacking is about as harmless as talking about kitchen knives. However, when someone without experience handling kitchen knives is asking for tips and tricks, it's prudent to always warn first about the health hazard associated with working with kitchen knives, and if someone says he/she wants to use a kitchen knive to wound or kill another living being, that someone should be flamed to a hefty crisp in my opinion. The same goes for hacking.
Just my personal opinion in somewhat extended form, for which I apologise, I don't want to abuse the bandwidth, but I'm just so angry at the fact that the first question about hacking is always "is it legal?", and legality has nothing to do with hacking as such, hacking is intellectual activity to gather knowledge and intellectual harmless learning fun, nothing more, and I do wish the "hacking" threads would cover real hacking subjects, like which wordlists to use for which ISP routers in what countries, or discovered flaws or backdoors to certain popular commercial routers, now that would be useful, it would be an enrichment, the readers of the thread would know what routers to avoid because they are flawed, or they would know how to hack the router or PC of their elderly uncle that has misplaced his password and doesn't want to lose the data on the PC or have to buy a new router, because there is actually a very good and practical use to network/system penetration knowledge as there is for any type of technical knowledge of the devices people use in their daily life.