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Project bovine is dedicated to the international effort to improve computer security worldwide by initiating massive brute force attacks. Funded by the international security services we break codes in order to improve security for everyone by enabling world governments and security services to create new more powerful and sophisticated codes which are more difficult to break.
No code is unbreakable, there is no such thing as a code which can not be deciphered. If something can be encrypted then it can be decrypted, it's more a question of how long it will take to break the code. Our government and security services can now create codes that are so difficult to crack it has been calculated that if we combined the computing power of every computer in the world and set them to break such a code it could take around 12 times the age of the universe to find the solution to break the most difficult cipher.
A white hat hacker, aka (ethical hacker), is in the realm of information technology, a person who is ethically opposed to the misuse of computer systems. A white hat generally focuses on securing IT systems, whereas a black hat (the opposite) would like to break into them, however this is a simplification as a black hat would wish to secure his own machine, and a white hat may have no issues breaking into it in the course of his or her activities. The term white hat hacker is also often used to describe those who attempt to break into systems or networks in order to help the owners of the system by making them aware of security flaws, or to perform some other altruistic activity. Many such people are employed by computer security companies. These professionals are called sneakers. Sneakers are organised into groups called tiger teams.
The primary difference between white and black hat hackers is that a white hat hacker observes ethical principles. Like black hats, white hats are often intimately familiar with the internal details of security systems, and can delve into obscure machine code when needed to find a solution to a tricky problem. Some use the term grey hat and fewer use brown hat to describe someone's activities that cross between black and white. In recent years the terms white hat and black hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt unfairly to redirect search results to particular target pages, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines.
An example hack could be with Microsoft Windows and its ability to use cryptographic libraries built into the operating system. When shipped overseas this feature becomes nearly useless as the operating system will refuse to load cryptographic libraries that haven't been signed by Microsoft, and Microsoft will not sign a library unless the U.S. government authorizes it for export. This allows the U.S. government to maintain some perceived level of control over the use of strong cryptography beyond its borders. While hunting through the symbol table of a beta release of Windows, a couple of overseas hackers managed to find a second signing key in the Microsoft binaries. That is, without disabling the libraries that are included with Windows (even overseas), these individuals learned of a way to trick the operating system into loading a library that hadn't been signed by Microsoft, thus enabling the functionality which had been lost to non-U.S. users. Whether this is good or bad may depend on whether one respects the letter of the law, but is considered by some in the computing community to be a white hat type of activity.
Many people who don't know anything about hacking believe that computer criminals are hackers. That's what news stories call computer criminals. See our news about busted "hackers" and you'll see headlines such as "UK hacker loses extradition fight, Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon is accused of gaining access to 97 US military and Nasa computers". These reporters who call criminals "hackers" make real hackers angry. Ethical hackers are essential and fundamental to our technological development, they are an integral. We have a genuine need for ethical hackers and we all have much to be thankful to them for. Ethical hackers have for decades pushed the envelope of our technological abilities to the breaking point then burst through the envelope to reveal fields of possibility never imagined and new horizons to strive for. By hacking the technological systems which govern our modern electronic world they have made a massive contribution to our technological and social development and made many crucial differences to our world, and made some profound advances in technology which we all now benefit from so routinely and so often that we often forget or just fail to recognise just how much of a difference they have made to our technological progression.
The author of “The New Hacker's Dictionary” says, “Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them, being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hot wire 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, hackers build things; crackers break them”.
The Conscience of a Hacker
Another one got caught today, it's all
over the papers.
"Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker
Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology
and 1950's
technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him,
what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school.
I'm smarter than
most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've
listened to teachers
explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I
understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my
work. I did it in my head."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer.
Wait a second, this is cool. It does
what I want it to.
If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened. A door opened
to a world rushing
through my phone line like heroin through an addict's veins,
an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day
incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I
belong."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never
talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all.
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike.
You bet your ass we're all alike...
we've been spoon-fed baby
food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of
meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.
The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils,
but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of
the electron and the switch,
the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing
without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by
profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge...
and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin color, without
nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic
bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and
try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that
of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what
they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something
that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all...
After all, we're all alike.
(The Mentor (aka) Loyd Blankenship)
January 8, 1988