How Hackers Identify Their Targets 95
narramissic writes "In a recent article, security guru Brent Huston writes about research he did to get inside the minds of spammers and expose some of the processes they use to identify potential targets. Huston says that among the four common ways that spam is spread, the most common method that spammers use is via open relays. Huston's research also revealed that 'they were doing much more server analysis' than he had expected and that they take a multi-step approach: 'They scan the server for proper RFC compliance, and then they send a test message to a disposable address. Only after these are complete did they adopt the tool to dump their spam.'"
hacker /= spammer (Score:5, Insightful)
Hackers != Spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
Hacky Definitions (Score:2, Insightful)
They're talking about "crackers", "phishers", scammers and criminals. They're not trying to make a system do anything cool, except when it damages or robs a person. Just making a system do something unexpectedly cool is irrelevant unless it takes something from a person, not the system.
Re:Duh... It's so obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many times I imagine that rookie administrators are trying to get sendmail just to work right so they enable something they shouldn't. It works... and they never bother to address their issue correctly, or even know that they addressed it incorrectly.
Zonk, your stories have high suck ratio. (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks but no thanks for this one.
Re:Hackers != Spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
-matthew
Re:He is wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
One is where the person installs a mail server and doesn't know how to configure it.
The other is where someone runs an operating system and doesn't know how to use it.
Of course the latter might be more because it it was made by developers who didn't know how to write it.
Re:Oh, give it up, already! (Score:4, Insightful)
Read "Hackers" the book, written in 1984, long before any of those media morons that you believe now had even thought of the word.
Hacker is a term of skill, cracker is a term for a person who breaks into systems. And as you say just because the media tells me a banana is a car doesn't make it so.