14 DAY TRIAL // It's not so hard to be a hacker these days. You don't have to be a geek to know a lot of script. Now, hackware has a nice interface and even comes with support! I guess that the hardest part is to get inside one of these communities because then you can simply buy the software and with so many sites and users as well, having security problems - how hard can it be to become a black-hatter ?
And how much do you think these cost? A few thousand dollars? Ten thousand? No Way! They start as low as $34, yep, that's right! Even a janitor can afford to buy such programs! They will go as high as $1.000 but than again, that's MPack, a sort of premium program. Ever heard of the Russian Business Network? Or The Italian Job? Well, the first distributes it, while the second was a foul operation in which it was used.
In any case, if you are bound on hacking something, you can easily find the tools on the web. And a lot of them have dumbed down hacking, like that Shark 2 malware I wrote about in August - it created viruses at the push of a button. Anyone could do it!
Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing has declared that many hacking groups were offering tools such as Mpack, Shark 2, Nuclear, WebAttacker and IcePack that made it much easier for unskilled people to get into the hi-tech crime game, as seen on BBC's site. See? This is why the Germans have that law against hacking tools - they didn't care for white-hatters when they banned those tools. But even though it hurt some researchers, that law is bound to make a difference in online security.