Hernandez 1 Cesar Hernandez Prof. Martinez English 1101 April 3, 2013 A Club of Hackers; Because Everyone is a Hacker An Ethnographic Study of a Club of Hackers’ Discourse Community Breaking News: “Hackers’ credit theft creates financial headache”, “Hackers steal US government corporate data from PCs”, “Hackers Called Truth Seekers”, “Hackers’ for good: Uncle Sam is looking for patriotic computer geeks.” Headlines like these nowadays come up so often on major newspapers and news channels that the term hacker has come connote criminal activities and anyone associated with it is automatically deemed to be nothing more than a low life exploiting the hard work of others. However, this is not the case, and it is my intention with this paper to demonstrate that not all hackers are the evil-minded individuals that popular media portrays them to be. What is a Hacker?
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Hernandez 1
Cesar Hernandez
Prof. Martinez
English 1101
April 3, 2013
A Club of Hackers; Because Everyone is a Hacker
An Ethnographic Study of a Club of Hackers’ Discourse Community
3. How long have you been a member of this club?a. I founded the club.
4. What made you want to join this club and what are you trying to get out of it?a. I am trying to build a community for people to learn about computer security and
inspire good ethics in them. I want them to know right from wrong.5. In your own words, how would you describe the goals of this club?
a. To foster a learning environment, where anyone regardless of their knowledge can come in and participate in our meetings. We want people to see the good side of cyber security not what is portrayed on the media.
6. How hard do you believe it is to join this club? Are there any prerequisites?a. Everyone is welcome to come to our meetings; anyone can come in and hopefully learn
something new. Even if they walk in knowing nothing about computers but walk out of here knowing something new then we have done our job.
7. What methods of communication does this club use?a. IRC, Facebook posts, and email.
8. What methods of feedback does the club use?a. Verbal communication, anonymous emails, we take suggestions from the members:
they wanted to learn about Metasploit so we had someone make a presentation on it.9. Who do you believe has power in this club? How does one gain power in the club?
a. We like to keep it flat, “board members” have certain privileges like the right to reserve rooms for meeting and events but for the most part we like everyone to have an equal voice.
10. Did you try to join the competing team KnightSec? Did you get in?a. The team is actually called: CCDC Team, I am part of it as co-captain with Jonathan
Singer.11. What is the selection process for members of this team?
a. This is our first year so we mostly looked for people with previous experience and who had shown participation within the club. This will probably change in the future where we will be having tryouts.
12. Are competitions only for the KnightSec team or can anyone participate in them?a. There are two types of competitions. There is the Cyber Collegiate Defense
Competitions which are sponsored by the NSA and it is only for the members of the competing club. These competitions are very rigorous because our team is given a
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machine and we must defend them from a red team hired to break everything and stomp on us. The other competitions are called Capture the Flag, these competitions are similar to Jeopardy games where there are categories of questions which range from reverse engineering to looking up someone on Google, and they are open to anyone.
13. How did you do in these competitions?a. On average we are usually on the top 20% of the leaderboards.
14. What kind of skills do you believe are important to have? As a professional? For competitions?a. Good communication, need to have original thinking, very logical thinking. Technical
skills range from knowing how to program in Python, to being able to use tools like ADA, WireShark, Netcap and Snort.
15. What are your views on cybercrime in the past couple of years? Do you believe anything needs to change?
a. I don’t believe that there is more cybercrime per say I just think that it is more public now. I view computers like a modern hammer, in the old days they used hammer to break locks on doors; computers are the new hammers. This is not a new problem its just has evolved into something different.
16. In your own words, how do you define a hacker? Can hackers be good? Based on your definition of hackers do you consider yourself to be a hacker? If so what kind?
a. A hacker is just somebody who knows more about a system than the person who developed it. Do you believe everything you are told? If you do you are nothing more than someone’s bitch, if you don’t and choose to mess with that than you are a hacker. However, hackers are neither good nor bad. Once you have acquired some sort of knowledge that you shouldn’t have it is what you do with it that can make you an asshole, and that’s what gives hackers the stigma they get from society. We are all hackers, hacking is not something that is just related to computers. There two types of hackers, white hat hackers which are the ones that make the decision to inform companies about vulnerabilities and then there are black hat hackers who decide to make a profit those vulnerably. So yea, if I am a hacker than everyone is a hacker.