Do You Know How To Become A Hacker ?

The main requirements to become a hacker are competence , attitude and styles.

1. Skills

1. Learn how to program.It is the fundamental hacking skill. It means you’ll have to learn a programming language. Preferably more than one, you can learn a lot by comparing two languages and look for similarities and differences in the way they handle a situation. But programming is more than writing code.
2. Learn to run an operating system. The Hacker community is much Unix/Linux oriented these days. There are several reasons, an important one being that with open-source. Unixes you get the code as well. You can actually read how the operating system is written, you can get to know it well enough to modify if you want to.
   Unix / Linux is also very network/internet oriented, learning to understand Unix / Linux will help for the next skill you’ll need to acquire. And it comes with free programming tools.
3. Learn about data communication and networks
4. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Technically, the internet is just a collection of computer networks. But it has become an important communication medium as well, and can be used for many things. Sharing information is one. You’ll need to know how to write HTML to publish on the web.
   Designing a web site with a good logical structure and a matching directory structure is also an exercise worth doing to sharpen a skill or two.
5. If you don’t have functional English, learn it. There is a lot of information on the web or in books, available in English. And apparently English has developed a richer technical vocabulary so that a lot gets lost in translations.

2. Style

Style does not matter as much as competence though. The way of your style is an expression of your own personality and hackers recognize certain personality traits. Apart from intelligence, the ability to learn, concentration, analytical thinking, hackers usually also show signs that they use both hemispheres of the brain, not just the left side, the logical, analytical mind. This will allow there mind to dig the logic of a problems

Here are few activities that show you may have this ability, and can help you to improve it

• Learn to write your native language well.
• Read science fiction.
• Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing. Discover the mathematics of music, and the beauty in the mathematics
• Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

A few things not to do.

• Don’t use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.
• Don’t get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).
• Don’t call yourself a `cyberpunk’, and don’t waste your time on anybody who does.
• Don’t post or email writing that’s full of spelling errors and bad grammar.

Most of the above mentioned things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material.

3. Attitude

Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. Hacker Attitude has to do with finding pleasure in solving problems and building things, looking for new problems to solve rather than re-invent the wheel time and time again. Hackers are open-minded, towards the problems they want to solve as well as towards the world in general. Hackers avoid boredom and brain-dead repetitive work

Most important is they believe that attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be as a hacker you need to have this kind of attitude in yourself. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated.

Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:-

to follow the path,
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

Style and Attitude are important, but can never be a substitute for competence. Attitude without competence means your posing. Attitude and style are things you develop in time. Hacker skills require intelligence, and hard work.

4. Status

There are some hackers obviously are more well known than other hackers. There is something like status in the hacker community

5. Ethics

With knowledge comes power,and with power comes responsibility.Many books have been written about ethics, many more will be written. I won’t add to that discussion.

Star Wars said it all  there are hackers, so there is also the temptation of The Dark Side

Here Is Mayhem Hacker Robot To Protect Us From Hacking Attacks

ForAllSecure, the minds behind the Mayhem Hacker Robot who won the Pentagon’s Cyber Grand Challenger Contest, are working to make the software a bug fixer. They are aiming an autonomous system which would find vulnerabilities in the commercial devices like routers and automatically fix them.

Every year, we see large botnets of compromised devices affecting the internet on a global scale. Although, as impossible it may sound, the future might have an army of robots dedicated to fixing vulnerabilities in devices like routers and IoT devices, often a soft target for hackers while building massive botnets to create high-intensity DDoS attacks.

Last year, a startup ForAllSecure’s Mayhem software won the DARPA’s $2 million Cyber Grand Challenge contest, where automated systems from different teams engaged in a hacking battle.

The ForAllSecure team behind the robot hacker Mayhem wants to deploy it in the real world fixing vulnerabilities and bugs in the software running on commercial hardware, like routers. Such devices are widely dependent on the firmware pushed by their vendor’s.

Hardware companies sacrifice a significant chunk of their money pie to provide security patches and fixes – created by humans – for their older products. An automated system in existence will bring a substantial ease for such companies.

“Now when a machine is compromised it takes days or weeks for someone to notice and then days or weeks—or never—until a patch is put out,” says David Brumley, the co-founder and the CEO of ForAllSecure. He is an associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon University.

“Imagine a world where the first time a hacker exploits a vulnerability he can only exploit one machine and then it’s patched,” Brumley adds.

ForAllSecure is trying to make Mayhem software a bug fixer. They are working with some companies, assisting them in fixing bugs in their products. However, the story may not be buttery smooth. Not all the devices makers would wholeheartedly welcome an autonomous bug fixing system for their hardware.

Security patches applied without human interference can put a question about quality assurance. Something bad may happen with the devices due to incompatible fixes. But it is still too early to make any assumptions. Brumley acknowledges this thing, but according to him, human involvement “slows down the process”.

Here Are Anonymous Share Simple Guide On “How To Hack Donald Trump’s Smartphone”

The notorious hacking group Anonymous has shared a little guide on Twitter, telling how to hack Donald Trump’s Android smartphone. The guide mentions that Trump’s Samsung Galaxy S3, which run Android 4.4, is outdated. It makes Galaxy S3 easily hackable using techniques like Stagefright. Notably, many security researchers have also pointed out this loophole in the past.

One of the major factors in the recent US presidential elections were the email leaks of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, which signaled the weak cyber security measures. Now, Donald Trump is himself a target of popular hacktivist group Anonymous.

Anonymous doesn’t have much affection for the United States President Donald Trump. Given the absurd policies of Trump, this stance shouldn’t surprise anyone. The hackers have published a little guide on Twitter, telling how to hack Donald Trump’s smartphone.

The notorious group claims that the President is an easy target to hacking attacks. Wondering why? Because he “refuses to use another smartphone other than the Galaxy S3.”

In the tweet, Anonymous mentioned a popular Android exploit that could potentially do the job of cracking Donald Trump’s smartphone. It says that a Galaxy S3, which runs Android 4.4, doesn’t even meet the security requirements of an average teenager.

The group insists that using Stagefright, one can easily hack Galaxy S3 by “enticing Trump to click on a link.” To use Stagefright exploit to hack Trump’s phone, a hacker will need to make him download a crafted MMS containing a .MP4 file.

It should be noted that, in all likelihood, since taking office, Trump has been using a Samsung Galaxy S3 Phone. Many media reports have also noted that the standard Galaxy S3 received its last security update about 2 years ago. Thus, as Anonymous points out, it might be vulnerable to Stagefright.

What do you think? Is Trump’s Android phone a threat to the US security? Do share your feedback and views.

Here is What Now Google Chrome gets its own barcode & QR code scanner

Picture by Padsainformation

Now you can free-up more space on your iPhone, wondering why? because you don’t need that  barcode and QR code scanner your mobile anymore. With the new update, the Google’s Chrome mobile browser can do the same job instead. Google Chrome now includes aa built-in scanning function, which you can use either by doing a search for “QR” in the spotlight or by using 3D Touch on the app’s icon.

Even though the shortcuts only refer to the QR code scanning, Chrome can also scan a traditional barcode product for you. The barcode scan will take you to a Google Search results page of the item in question, a place where you can check read reviews, prices, and more.

Despite the rumours to the contrary, QR codes have not entirely died out. If anything, they have started to make a comeback due to the adaptation of the apps like Kik, Messenger, and Snapchat, as well as in the food labelling. Even Amazon is now putting QR codes on some of its own packagings now, as with its Elements brand of baby products.

Still, it is not the kind of thing you will do often enough to just justify keeping a barcode scanning app on hand all the time.

Because of the limited adoptation of the QR codes, smartphone makers are hesitant to fully integrate the QR code scanning function into their operating systems, even though it would be a simple add-on from the Camera. The iPhone’s QR code reader has tucked away inside the Wallet app, for example, where it’s used to scan coupons, boarding passes, tickets and the like. This presumes these are main ways that QR codes are used, but, in reality, that’s a limited subset of what QR codes can do.

With scanning bundled into Chrome, you have a more functional barcode scanner without needing a separate app. The update is out now on iPhone.

Systemd vs SysV vs Upstart — Linux Service Management Throwdown

The world of Linux is in a perpetual flame-war, the latest longstanding controversy is the topic of system service management. We needed a modern system service manager and systemd set a bar that nothing else could meet. Now with systemd being the default, many people are up in arms about it claiming that systemd impedes on open source software and freedom of choice. Is there something more sinister going on with systemd, or is this flame-war just smoke and mirrors?

What is a system service? It’s a pretty broad, but easily answered question. System services, often called daemons in the Linux and UNIX communities, are simply programs that run in the background that either provide functionality to other programs, like audio or networking capabilities, or they might monitor security events and provide alerts. Either way, as the name suggests, they provide services to the other programs running on the system.

So, how can something so fundamental and essential be so controversial? Just because there’s choice. You don’t see flame wars surrounding the system service management on Windows or OS X simply because there is no choice. But on Linux, there’s always a choice.

Part of the problem is that the system service managers also initialize the system, and there are many ways of going about doing that. The SysV init style has been around since, well, the System V days (System V was released in 1983).This set the trend for the way that POSIX compliant systems would be initialized. The SysV init style remained the de facto for almost three decades, with a few exceptions. Many IT professionals and software engineers did not want to abandon the SysV init because it had served them well for so many years, and it was a very simple process to understand. So, the introduction of anything that could replace it was met with strong resistance.

The problem with SysV init, though, was that it was built on concepts from many years before. It lacked the ability to natively handle many things, such as the detection of removable storage media, properly detecting hardware and allowing firmware to load, and it oversimplified the possible states of a computer to single-user mode, single-user with networking, multi-user mode, multi-user graphical mode, reboot, and halt. This only provided the customization of two modes, the multi-user mode, and multi-user graphical mode. This gross oversimplification severely limited the manageability of the system from an administrative point of view. This wasn’t a problem for personal computers, but it definitely limited the administrative potential of servers in production environments.

In an attempt to bring more features to the Linux initialization process, Canonical released Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) in 2006 with Upstart. Upstart was designed with backward compatibility from the start. It could run daemons without any modification to the startup scripts. Because of this, many Linux distributions moved toward Upstart, but not all of them. In fact, the Debian based Devuan was developed in spite of Debian moving to systemd. Devuan uses SysV init, but offers many other choices.

In 2010, Red Hat engineers Lennart Poettering and Key Sievers had started developing systemd. The following spring Fedora 15 was released with systemd, the first ever systemd powered distribution. Over the course of the next three years, the majority of distributions switched to systemd for two major reasons, the inherent benefits of an updated system initialization system, and also not wanting to be left behind.

But, if systemd is considered better by all these distributions, enterprise and hobbyist alike, why is there so much controversy? Why was there so much resistance to something that is nearly unanimously agreed upon as better? The answer is choice.

systemd offers many, many improvements over SysV init and Upstart, but it also provides other components that developers can leverage for less work and tighter system integration. What’s wrong with that? Well, as developers write all this software that depends on systemd and/or any of its many other services (such as journald, udevd, consoled, logind, or networkd), that software then becomes less compatible with systems that are not running systemd. Furthermore, as the number of services provided by the systemd project continues to grow, systemd becomes more dependent on them itself. As a result, systemd is becoming a platform on its own and its ubiquity is inadvertently discouraging the development of software that is portable and compatible with non-systemd systems. I’m sure it’s now easy to see why some people would be so resistant to systemd.

But, is systemd really that bad? Of course not. It’s open source and people have the choice to use it or not. While users and developers might benefit from a more diverse system initialization landscape, it is not the fault of systemd that major distributions have made the switch, unless you consider the numerous benefits it provides.

As mentioned, there has been much resistance to systemd, but we have many alternatives. You can still use sysvinit, Upstart, or others like OpenRC, sinit, runit, shepherd, and s6 (provided your distribution supports them). There are still many distributions that work hard to maintain non systemd distributions. As mentioned before, there’s Devuan, but also Gentoo, Slackware, Dragora, and PCLinuxOS, and many UNIX operating systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD. The bottom line is that there is still choice, which is a large part of what open source is about.