Attacks on security experts are still common, but a new trend is the
increase in attacks on other hackers' systems. One Australian hacker
joked, `What are the other hackers going to do? Call the Feds? Tell
the AFP, "Yes, officer, that's right, some computer criminal broke
into my machine and stole 20000 passwords and all my exploitation code
for bypassing firewalls".'
For the most part, elite hackers seem to work alone, because of the
well-advertised risks of getting caught. There are still some
underground hacking communities frequented by top hackers, most notably
UPT in Canada and a few groups like the l0pht in the US, but such groups
are far less common, and more fragmented than they used to be.
These hackers have reached a new level of sophistication, not just in
the technical nature of their attacks, but in their strategies and
objectives. Once, top hackers such as Electron and Phoenix were happy
to get copies of Zardoz, which listed security holes found by industry
experts. Now top hackers find those holes themselves--by reading line
by line through the proprietary source code from places like DEC, HP,
CISCO, Sun and Microsoft.
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