Understand The Hacker Mindset To Become A Real Hacker

Now a days everyone wants to get into the hackers’ community. They look cool, they crack code, they program and they find interesting stuff along their lives. so in this article you will learn to understand the hacker mindset to become a real hacker.

Recommend to read my previous article: How To Become A Hacker - Complete Guide For Beginners 2015

What the public doesn’t understand is the real meaning of this word. In the past couple of years, journalism has destroyed this word by using it to refer to criminals with malicious intentions. After years and years of using the word hackers in the wrong way, the general belief is that they are people you don’t want to be friends with.

However a hacker is not what you think he/she is. The term itself comes from the early days at MIT, when people were inventing what later became computer science. Richard Stallman was and is a hacker. He likes programming, he used to share his discoveries and he was innovating in his field.

Being a hacker is more a mindset than a matter of skills. In the early 50s, hackers were those who innovated by building new computers, inventing new programming languages and creating the basis for a software revolution. The stereotype of a hacker was a guy with great interests in technology and great analytical skills, which fed his curiosity to find and discover new things.

Eric Raymond, one of the founders of open source and early employee at the Free Software Foundation, gives an extensive definition of what Hackers are in his Jargon File:

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture first coined the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet, they made the Unix operating system what it is today and they make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you’re a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacking culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — and actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too, some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think these people are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
Criminals are crackers, not hackers. If someone breaks into your computer in order to steal something, he is a criminal; he’s not a Hacker.

The only way to become a hacker is to do what you love, there is no book, jargon or general rule. Hackers are people who love what they are doing and they just do it for the sake of doing it. If you try to define yourself as a hacker, just because you know ten different programming languages and have a lot of skills, you are wrong. It’s the community that decides if someone is a true hacker or not.

If you don’t know where to start, but you want to get into this “culture”, there are a few steps you may want to start taking. First, learn how to program. Writing code is essential, this culture invented modern programming languages, so the minimum you must do is to learn one of those. Further, start using one of the dozens of Linux distributions that you can find online. Windows and Mac Os are businesses and they were built for everyone, the GNU/Linux distributions were built just for the sake of doing it.

There were thousands of hackers programming and building operating systems just because they loved doing it. That’s why you may find them not so “customer oriented” and that’s why you should start using them. Further find some interesting IRC channels. IRC is all about interesting people who are helping each other on different topics, find them and start learning.

Remember, being a hacker is about sharing things and knowledge. It’s not about writing proprietary software, finding 0-Days and keeping them in order to use for malicious purposes or trying to steal. There is a close relationship between the definition of entrepreneur and hacker. They are not moved for money, they love what they do and they try to get more people involved in their own projects.

If you find that geeky guy with extremely good programming skills, who codes for his own needs, he’s the guy you should stick with.

Discover a Hacker's Mindset

Originally, the word “hacking” meant an elegant, witty or inspired way of doing almost anything.

In this session, you will learn how a hacker’s mindset can teach you to appreciate what is possible.

Key Points

• Hacking is more than just something mischievous tech geeks do for fun and profit: it is a habit of mind that ignites innovation and inspires invention

• The playground of hackers is not limited to the realm of PCs and the Internet: it encompasses nearly all devices,from everyday locks and keys to automobiles and mobile devices

• Forward-thinking corporations should consider taking hackers out of computer security departments and puttingthem in product development departments

Synopsis

Pablos Holman is a self-described “white hat hacker” – that is, one who puts his hacking skills to use to educate organizations about network security rather than wreak havoc in cyberspace and purloin sensitive data. In a lively and eye-opening session, Holman illustrated just some of the many security vulnerabilities that surround people in their everyday lives, demonstrating the ease with which hackers can manipulate remote car keys, networked hotel room television systems, cellular networks’ voicemail systems, Bluetooth-enabled devices and credit cards containing RFID chips.

Holman is also an inventor, who harnesses the very same out-of-the-box thinking and irrepressible curiosity that compels him to hack to come up with innovative solutions to some of the world’s more intractable problems. Holman and his colleagues at Intellectual Ventures Labs, founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, are now devoting their technological prowess and eclectic minds to intriguing projects: networks of giant, sea-borne rings made from recycled truck tires, that harness wave energy to push the warm surface downward to reduce warm air updrafts that create hurricanes; using hoses borne aloft by helium balloons to spray sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to mimic the effect of volcanic activity in hopes of reversing the retreat of the Arctic ice cap; and a technology to reuse the millions of tons of nuclear waste created by nuclear plants and weapons programes for power generation.

Where non-hackers typically look at a device – a mobile phone, for instance – and understands it in terms of “what does this device do”, the hacker looks at the same device and asks, “What can I make this device do?” Holman believes that this mindset is precisely what is needed to spark innovation and invention. And it is also the mentality needed in the World Economic Forum’s ongoing efforts to rethink, redesign and rebuild.

The Hacking Mindset

The idea that looking for magic shortcuts, and “hacks” might be related to the belief that one is special or doesn’t need to put in long hours of demanding work in order to achieve something.

I’d like to expand on this idea a bit and explain why I think the “hacking” mentality (in language learning or even “life” itself) may actually be a sign of a fixed mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you don’t like being told that things require hard work and sustained effort. After all, you’re special. You should be able to achieve success without effort, because you inherently deserve it.

A Fixed Audience

I think that the popularity of “hacking” websites is probably related to the creation of a generation of students with fixed mindsets (myself included, though . If you have a fixed mindset, you don’t want to hear that real skills take time to develop. You’re smart/talented/gifted/special and you need to prove this to people, perhaps by showing how quickly you can learn something. This means that hacks and shortcuts will be just what you’re looking for.

I think that this explains the widespread success of someone like Tim Ferriss, who promises that you can “master” skills in hours rather than years. This is a promise that appeals to the fixed mindset, suggesting that once you know the special secret, you no longer have to work hard. The irony is that I do think that Tim works very hard himself, but his relentless emphasis on short-cutting your way to success promotes a fixed mindset. His approach to supposed mastery seems to be more about creating a gilded appearance of skill that will convince others that you can speak X language, play Y instrument, or tango with the best of them, rather than admitting that, even with the best strategies, actually doing any of these things at a truly high level will require hours and hours (and hours) of focused effort and deliberate practice.

Of course, the appeal of reducing effort is not new, and I’m certainly not trying to argue against the idea of improving efficiency. Certainly we should want to “work smarter”, but we shouldn’t suppose that we are so “smart” we can completely remove the “work”. Increasing efficiency so that you can reduce overall effort is just laziness. Greater efficiency should enable us to do more, not less.

What’s the Rush?

If we put aside this fixed-mindset need to prove our talents and abilities, we’ll see that shortcuts to appearing successful are no longer particularly desirable. If you no longer care about impressing others (by speaking x language, lifting x weight, or cooking x meal) and you don’t actually enjoy the process of cultivating that particular skill, there’s really no reason to do it. Hacks and shortcuts for something you don’t like doing aren’t really saving you time, they’re just wasting it slightly more efficiently.  If you’re doing something you actually enjoy, there’s not much need to rush the process.

The Tortoise or the Hare?

Of course, I should be careful not to be hypocritical here. In other sections of this site you can find mnemonic techniques that could be considered “hacks” for memorizing numbers, learning to pronounce the Hangeul and Devanagari scripts, and memorizing the order of a pack of cards. I’m certainly not suggesting that techniques which allow rapid improvement are bad. What I am suggesting, however, is that while techniques like these help to simplify the initial steps of learning something new, they may cause us to underestimate the true amount of work (and time and frustration) required to reach intermediate and advanced stages.  There’s nothing wrong with sprinting ahead, just so long as you don’t start thinking that now you’ve got time to spare.

For example, creating mnemonics for Hangeul will certainly help one to get comfortable with the script more quickly. With mnemonics the (approximate) pronunciations can be learned in about an hour. Of course, this doesn’t mean that one can actually understand anything in Korean (except maybe some cognates). Now, without mnemonics, learning to pronounce the script may take a couple more hours. When considered in the overall context of a goal like “learning Korean”, using mnemonics saves a few hours, but saving a couple hours is rather insignificant when you think of the thousands of hours required to truly become fluent. It’s better to save a few hours where you can, but one shortcut is not a free pass to skip the majority of the effort.

The excitement of a technique that makes progress seem fast and effortless can temporarily blind us from the fact that there’s still a lot more work to be done. As a result, many people keep looking for more and more of these shortcuts rather than just focusing on the slow and steady process of actually doing the work. Now all the time spent searching for shortcuts (and putting off the real work) actually causes reduced efficiency and slower progress. I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself. So instead, I’m working to just accept the amount of effort that will be involved in reaching my goals and ignore the glittery promise of progress without effort.

The Hacker Mindset

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music. Actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them hackers too  and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term hacker.

The Basic Difference Between Hackers and Crackers

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people crackers and have nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word hacker to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

" Hackers build things, crackers break them."

A hacker mindset for success, the accelerated way

In the 19th century, it took John D Rockefeller, the oil tycoon 46 years to make $1bn. In the late 2000s it took Andrew Mason two years to do the same at Groupon, the online daily deals company. So opens Shane Snow’s book Smartcuts, which claims the difference is not all down to inflation. Arguing that progress can be a lot speedier these days, Snow cites futurist Ray Kurzweil’s essay “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, which suggest that “we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)”.

However, too many of us are mired in dated ways of doing things, argues Snow. Traditional thinking goes something like this: if we pay our dues and take our time, we might earn great success. What Snow suggests instead is that we learn from people such as Mr Mason, who “buck the norm and do incredible things in implausibly short amounts of time”.

Mr Mason is a curious benchmark of success to set for readers. After all, the Groupon founder and chief executive was sacked in 2013 due to overseeing accounting missteps, poor earnings and stock price. Notice of his dismissal went viral after his announcement that “after four-and-a-half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.”

Snow, a tech journalist in New York and co-founder of Contently, which provides content for brands, believes we all need a hacker mindset to become successful. He is not advocating criminality or even the skills of a coder but suggests applying lateral thinking to careers and business problems. Rather than shortcuts, he advocates ethical “smartcuts”, hence the book’s title. Classic success advice, he writes, is “work 100 hours a week, believe you can do it, visualise, and push yourself harder than everyone else. Claw that nail out with your bare hands ‘til they bleed if necessary”. He dismisses this as “the hard way”.

He argues, for example, that mentors do not work because they are stiff and formulaic. Yet companies pay vast sums for expensive mentoring schemes. He cites Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who wrote in her book, Lean In: “Searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming . . . Young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after.”

The smart mentee approaches things differently, suggests Snow. “She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she gets involved in her mentors’ lives too.” For those who favour boundaries when it comes to their colleagues, such a strategy will be alarming.

The modern mantra that we must embrace failure in order to succeed is debunked. In fact, he writes, we do not necessarily learn from our missteps because all too often we prefer to attribute our mistakes to others instead of making a real effort to learn from them.

Like a junior Malcolm Gladwell, the author fuses academic research with personal stories, citing a broad range of people who have achieved career success – from the Cuban revolutionaries to Skrillex, the electronic dance music producer, to cardiac surgeons. Snow’s advice is sensible if not groundbreaking: be savvy, flexible, make an effort to learn from your mistakes and others’ successes and collaborate with well-connected people.

This is a manifesto for success for those who do not want to toil away unnoticed. The book is shot through with an itchy impatience. Yet in his rush to take “smartcuts”, there is something that bothers me. If you achieve your desired goal – be it billions of dollars or millions of YouTube followers – what do precocious overachievers do then? What is all this success for?

Understanding the Hacker Mindset To Minimize the Risk of Becoming a Victim of a Cyber-Attack

Financial institutions need to start by learning about potential attackers and their preferred information targets - and then pinpoint vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

That's the advice from David Pollino, senior vice president and enterprise fraud prevention officer at Bank of the West, a $69 billion institution based in California. Pollino will be a featured presenter at Information Security Media Group's Fraud Summit in Los Angeles on Feb. 24.

"You not only need to know your attacker, but also what their tactics are," Pollino says in an exclusive interview with ISMG. "[Attackers] share information among themselves, and occasionally that information will find its way back to us, so that we can learn from it and modify our tactics accordingly." Once organizations identify what kind of information hackers have been targeting, they can more accurately pinpoint vulnerabilities that could be exploited, he explains. Another key step, he says, is to share what they've learned with peers, law enforcement, regulators - and even those in other industries, Pollino says.

"It is important for us to have a strong external and internal intelligence practice," he says. "Once we learn things, how do we share that back to the greater community? That's a key component of intelligence."

Pollino says understanding the threat landscape, and the unique challenges it poses for an individual organization or institution, is critical.

"Being able to drive for the right outcomes involves knowing what problem you're trying to solve, or, in some cases, knowing who your enemies are and how they react," Pollino says. "For us to give the right information to both our internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders, which include customers, law enforcement and other institutions, we really need to know what action they need to take. And that changes, based on the problem that we're trying to solve or the enemy that is attacking us."

During this interview, Pollino also discusses:

• How automation is helping banking institutions more readily share information;
• Why more needs to be done to expand threat intelligence sharing with other industries, such as retail and healthcare; and
• How consistent customer education can help with fraud reduction.

At the upcoming ISMG Fraud Summit LA, Pollino will speak on two topics - customer education and cyberthreat intelligence. Pollino, during a solo presentation, will review steps Bank of the West has taken to enhance cyber-awareness and customer education - a key anti-fraud measure the bank implemented in 2013, after suffering a $900,000 account takeover loss in December 2012 during a distributed-denial-of-service attack. Then, during a panel with Lance James, who heads up cyber intelligence for consultancy Deloitte & Touche, he'll explore why knowing more about the adversaries that wage cyber-attacks is so critical.

To learn more about the summit, visit the summit registration page.

Pollino has been with Bank of the West since 2011. Previously, he served as manager of online fraud prevention strategy and analytics for Wells Fargo and was the online risk officer for Washington Mutual. Pollino conducts ongoing research on cybercrime techniques.

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