Greetings everyone! Welcome to the first part of several blog posts for APLAC. Today's post is about the above "grey" characters - actually called anti-heroes by the teacher. To help put things in perspective, we'll be discussing Ichabod Crane, from Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in comparison to Max Ray Butler aka Iceman - a real-life person as described in Kevin Poulsen's Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over The Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.
Comparing a famous character and a little-time cyber criminal known only to the tech world would seem improbable but the two actually do have a lot in common.(In other words, I have less than two hours to finish this post so don't think hard while reading it.)
Ichabod Crane has two shadows in the book. One that strictly enforces the proverbial "spare the rod and spoil the child", teaches psalmody and actively participates in the village's errands and another that was devoid of any motive save for cunningly earned riches and personal gratification. Similarly, Iceman - Max Butler's online handle - at several points in time worked as a white-hat security consultant and programmer by day and an enthusiastic black-hat hacker (I'd prefer the term 'cracker'.) by night.
While discussing white-hats and black-hats, hackers and crackers would seem besides the point, to someone familiar with the cyber-security world, it is obvious that one person cannot belong to two groups simultaneously. It would mean destroying your own home at night and rebuilding it by daylight.
Another attribute that Crane and Butler seem to share is that of ill-fortune with women. It is no surprise that thousands of man-hours in form of physical and mental work trying to understand women have amounted to....well, nothing. That aside, those two individuals had considerable difficulty in this matter.
For Ichabod, it is not immediately clear what seems to be the problem because Irving ensures to tell us that he had a sizable following among the town's housewives in light of his teaching profession. Further reading, however, shows clearly that Crane wasn't successful with getting the woman he wanted because of malformed priorities. He valued her father's possessions more dearly than her. For all we know, he could have made uncalled-for gestures during the party that led to his disappointment and, ultimately, his disappearance.
For Butler, however, the trouble is that the social world did not function like a computer would. With just a few lines of code and logic, he could crawl the Internet to get what he wanted - be it unreleased episodes of his favorite games or credit card numbers with their full information. Therefore, he lost his high school girlfriend and later on in his adult life, his wife.
Max Butler could initiate a Distributed Denial of Service attack on any website at whim. He could play around in the Pentagon's Intranet or siphon-off credit card information from a machine inside a fast-food restaurant. But he could also find it his duty to fix gaping bugs in hundreds of thousands of computers.He made the Army's machines invulnerable to protocol breaches and secured countless others that could have been turned to bots had they been left open. He voluntarily gave out findings from his night-long adventures and eased the work of white-hats by being a black-hat. This is one of the traits that Iceman shares with Ichabod; the plenty good among the plenty bad.
Ichabod formed and instructed the village choir, held his students accountable to what he believed was the best method for disciplining them and engaged in the work of the townspeople. Whatever his delusions about money and riches, he had some of what is called "good".
And that is the crux of the matter! ARE THESE PEOPLE GOOD OR EVIL OR NON OF THOSE?
Comparing a famous character and a little-time cyber criminal known only to the tech world would seem improbable but the two actually do have a lot in common.
Ichabod Crane has two shadows in the book. One that strictly enforces the proverbial "spare the rod and spoil the child", teaches psalmody and actively participates in the village's errands and another that was devoid of any motive save for cunningly earned riches and personal gratification. Similarly, Iceman - Max Butler's online handle - at several points in time worked as a white-hat security consultant and programmer by day and an enthusiastic black-hat hacker (I'd prefer the term 'cracker'.) by night.
While discussing white-hats and black-hats, hackers and crackers would seem besides the point, to someone familiar with the cyber-security world, it is obvious that one person cannot belong to two groups simultaneously. It would mean destroying your own home at night and rebuilding it by daylight.
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| Iceman - wired.com |
For Ichabod, it is not immediately clear what seems to be the problem because Irving ensures to tell us that he had a sizable following among the town's housewives in light of his teaching profession. Further reading, however, shows clearly that Crane wasn't successful with getting the woman he wanted because of malformed priorities. He valued her father's possessions more dearly than her. For all we know, he could have made uncalled-for gestures during the party that led to his disappointment and, ultimately, his disappearance.
For Butler, however, the trouble is that the social world did not function like a computer would. With just a few lines of code and logic, he could crawl the Internet to get what he wanted - be it unreleased episodes of his favorite games or credit card numbers with their full information. Therefore, he lost his high school girlfriend and later on in his adult life, his wife.
Max Butler could initiate a Distributed Denial of Service attack on any website at whim. He could play around in the Pentagon's Intranet or siphon-off credit card information from a machine inside a fast-food restaurant. But he could also find it his duty to fix gaping bugs in hundreds of thousands of computers.He made the Army's machines invulnerable to protocol breaches and secured countless others that could have been turned to bots had they been left open. He voluntarily gave out findings from his night-long adventures and eased the work of white-hats by being a black-hat. This is one of the traits that Iceman shares with Ichabod; the plenty good among the plenty bad.
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| Ichabod - cornel1801.com |
Ichabod formed and instructed the village choir, held his students accountable to what he believed was the best method for disciplining them and engaged in the work of the townspeople. Whatever his delusions about money and riches, he had some of what is called "good".
And that is the crux of the matter! ARE THESE PEOPLE GOOD OR EVIL OR NON OF THOSE?
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