What is hacking?
Hello everyone, and welcome to my very first article.
I think we need to start with some basics if I want the articles that follow to be coherent.
And one of the notions that seems to me to be of paramount importance is hacking. That’s why, here, I’m going to clearly explain what, in my opinion, the term hacking means.
First of all, let’s start with a little illustration:
You probably know this puzzle:
The goal is to pass through all the dots, without lifting your pen, using a maximum of 4 line segments. Give it a try!
Without the hacking mindset, it’s impossible to solve this problem. But what exactly is the hacking mindset?
An origin
Hacking doesn’t really have a clearly defined origin agreed upon by everyone. But it’s often said that hacking was born with the appearance of the first computers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the 1950s. An attraction (which quickly became an obsession) emerged among MIT students who, with computers intended only for simple calculations, spent days and nights improving what they were made for, tinkering with them.
The hacker ethic was actually created at MIT. It states six rules:
- Access to computers - and to anything that can teach us how the world really works - should be unlimited and total.
- Information should be free and unrestricted.
- Mistrust authority. Promote decentralization.
- Hackers should be judged by their work, not by criteria they consider bogus such as position, age, nationality or degrees.
- You can create art and beauty on a computer.
- Computers are made to change life.
A definition
The term hacking, contrary to what one might think, is absolutely not pejorative. No, quite the opposite. Originally, hacking is the art of tinkering. More specifically, the hacker will try to fumble around in order to deeply study the possibilities initially offered by an object, and to divert its primary function in order to perform a desired task, even though it was not originally intended.
This diversion can be practiced for several purposes (non-exhaustive): correction, improvement, addition of features, but also, sometimes, bypassing security measures or retrieving confidential data.
This principle is illustrated by a story, borrowed from the book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation - Jon Erickson:
A man walking in the woods finds a magic lamp on the ground. Instinctively, he picks up the lamp and rubs its side with his sleeve, and a genie pops out. The genie thanks the man for setting him free and promises to grant him three wishes of his choice. The ecstatic man knows immediately what he’s going to ask for.
“First,” says the man, “I want a billion dollars.”
The genie snaps his fingers and a briefcase full of bills appears in a slight gust of wind.
The man eagerly continues, “Next, I want a Ferrari.”
The genie snaps his fingers and a Ferrari appears in a cloud of smoke.
The man adds, “And finally, I want women to find me irresistible.”
The genie snaps his fingers and the man turns into a box of chocolates.
This moral sums up the hacking spirit perfectly: When a person designs something for a certain purpose, just because it’s supposed to be used in a certain way doesn’t mean it can’t be used in another way.
A (very short) conclusion
If I had to sum up hacking in a single sentence, it would be: Think out of the box (Think differently, in an unconventional way, with a new perspective).
PS: Here’s the solution to the puzzle posed at the beginning of this article. Did you figure it out? Congratulations!
