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"I love Reddit's self-post category. For those unfamiliar with a self-post, it's a Reddit post that links back to itself; it's useful for questions, polls and discussion. While often misused, the community at Reddit rewards and votes mostly for interesting ones, and there's a very cool one at the front page today. \nIn it, a convicted young hacker who got into hacking at an early age, got caught by the authorities, was given a suspended prison sentence and got slapped by huge fines, answers questions about himself. Provided it's genuine (and it seems that way from the answers), it's a fascinating opportunity: I bet many of you wanted to know the motivations, habits and the moral values of such a person. \nThe author sums it up nicely in the introduction: \"I never hacked anything for financial gain and I don't consider myself a criminal. I'm actually a pretty nice guy.\" However, the folks at Reddit have come up with some very interesting questions (not all are attempts at humor, mind you), and the answers are well worth your time. Here's a small sample of interesting questions and answers from Reddit:\n\nmikm: Without naming specifics, how big was your highest-profile target?1094795585: Fortune-500-big. NIPRnet-big.\nqgyh2Typically, how secure are modern web sites?1094795585: Not very secure. SQL-injections are everywhere.\ncup: ...How does one begin to get to a level where you were, hacking into computers...1094795585: The way I got started was that I saw a documentary about hackers at defcon, they were interviewing one of the top teams in the CTF and I thought they were completely awesome. So I looked them up and mailed the leader, asking how to become a hacker. He told me to buy \"Hacking Exposed\" and read it from cover to cover 5 times, then I would begin to understand how it is possible to hack into computers. It's a pretty basic book, it mostly covers specific hacking techniques but also introduces some concepts like buffer overflows. Then you just need to experiment and read, hacking is a lot about experience, you can't learn everything from a book.\norezpraw: How do you secure your own system?1094795585: I keep my services to a minimum, and I keep them updated. On my Linux box I use custom kernel hardening patches to make memory corruption bugs pretty hard to exploit. OpenSSH is firewalled and only accepts a connection from your ip if you visit a custom port-knocking page on my webserver. Basically the only service listening is apache, without PHP.On my desktop and laptop I don't have any services listening at all.\n\nCheck out the entire thread here. \nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, depo881"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/insight-hacker/>