Hackers And The Internet

Phillip Murphy was trying to e-mail suppliers for his floral business when he found his e-mail service had been attacked by hackers. Murphy makes use of the e-mail service through Yahoo!, one of many web sites disrupted in mid-February because of hackers (Jesdanun).

The attacks occurred over a three-day period and affected other companies such as

• Amazon.com
• ETrade
• eBay

The web sites were bombarded with fake traffic for a few hours at a time each day, which resulted in customers having problems accessing the web sites. "It was like hundreds of pranksters trying to call a single phone number at once" (Jesdanun).

Think about the hundreds of people who wanted to make purchases at Amazon.com or bid on products at eBay.  It can be very discouraging, and annoying, to find web sites are unavailable.  In the case of web sites like Amazon.com customers may have surfed to other web sites that were not attacked by hackers.

My immediate thought when seeing error messages when trying to visit web sites is not that hackers have attacked, but the company does not know what they are doing.  Many people make the assumption the company can not handle a web site and therefore go to alternative web sites that offer the same product.

Although it was an annoying disruption for Murphy to not be able to contact his suppliers from his Minneapolis store, he isn't any less happy with using the internet. Murphy decided he would just sign up for a second e-mail address with another company as a backup plan (Jesdanun).

The internet is still a fairly new technology, which is changing all the time. People should expect problems to occur with the internet, just as there are problems with other technology. Hacking into web sites became a large problem once it affected many of the well-known sites on the web.

Overcoming Attacks      top

Murphy said people will overcome the hackers' attacks on the web, just as they did in the 1980s when the drug tampering scare topped the news (Jesdanun). In the future he will use his alternate e-mail account.  Others will use their backupplan. H.K. Turner normally buys stocks through ETrade, but is so used to outages the recent one didn't even phase him. Turner made use of his backup plan to buy his stocks (Jesdanun).

Having a backup plan is important.   It allows you to continue conducting business via another email account or another web site.  But can there be a backup for everything?  That is up to the individual.  Although two web sites may offer the same product, the price may determine there is only one option for an individual.

Consumer confidence did not seem to drop with any of the affected web sites, according to Internet analysts. After Yahoo! was back up and running, web site traffic was unchanged. Echoing Turner's thoughts, Yahoo! spokeswoman "Diane Hunt said customers are used to outages of power, water and phones, so they weren't alarmed by the web disruption" (Jesdanun).

At eBay, a common auction site, the only customers seriously affected were those whose auctions were scheduled to end during one of the web site outages during the three day period. eBay had no problem allowing those customers extensions or credits, which was a quick fix for the problem (Jesdanun).

Greg Hawkins, the chief executive of Buy.com summed it up saying if these outages from hackers happened on a regular basis, web surfers and companies would not be happy. With it happening rarely and with several web sites affected, no one company had to take all the blame (Jesdanun).

"'Consumer confidence won't be threatened unless large numbers of individuals are really hurt for significant periods of time,' said Frank Prince, senior analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. 'No sites were down permanently for days or weeks'" (Jesdanun). Over the three day period of periodic outages, few Internet consumers were affected. Maybe some people didn't check their email for a few hours, but that already happens when you are in a place without a computer.

Hackers or Crackers?      top

What seems interesting is that these attacks on the web are said to have been caused by hackers, when by definition, this is untrue. The word hacker is a noun meaning "1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. 2. One who programs enthusiastically. 3. A person who is good at programming quickly. 4. An expert at a particular program, as in 'a Unix hacker'" (Discovery Online).

Hackers started as geeks who had a curiosity about how computers worked. Programmers used computers running at the speed of a snail, but then came smart programmers who made shortcuts for programs to make them run faster.

These shortcuts took on the name of "hack." The shortcuts became common knowledge, but that didn't stop the smart programmers. They wanted to be ahead of common knowledge, so they started trying to find shortcuts in games, starting with the Legion of Doom (Discovery Online).

Up until this point, hackers were just those smart programmers, and in essence the word "hacker" means the same thing it did years ago. The word "hacker" is positive, meaning someone who is good at programming quickly, but because of what some hackers have done, the word is thought of as something negative.

Hackers have caused the crash of web sites and have tapped into secure documents, sometimes stealing credit card numbers and other important information. These hackers are called crackers.

The word cracker is a noun meaning "One who breaks security on a system. Coined by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of the term 'hacker.' The term 'cracker' reflects a strong revulsion at the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. There is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than most would suspect" (Discovery Online).

The public blames hackers for breaking into web sites and crashing e-mail systems, but they should really be blaming the crackers. Hackers are programmers who are trying to help find quicker ways to use programs, while crackers are programmers trying to steal information and hurt others.

Sources      top

Jesdanun, Anick. "Web Users: Attacks Not Catastrophic." 11 February 2000. <http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ei=1497467&ern=y>

Discovery Online. Hackers Hall of Fame. 1997. <http://www.discovery.com/area/technology/hackers/hackers.html>

This site maintained by Stacey Hart.  Last updated 3/28/00.