đ July 16, 2020
â˘âąď¸3 min read
In 1993, sat in a friendâs bedroom as a spotty teen, I downloaded a file â how to hack.
This was the first time I had read anything about hackers. It intrigued me. I understood there were ways to program computers to make the computer games that I loved playing, and do typing for offices⌠But hacking. Breaking into a computer. That was new. What was it all about?
The file was short and didnât go into technical details â not that I would have understood. It explained there were 3 steps needed to hack a company.
- Find out as much information as possible. About the company, about the computer system⌠any details are useful.
- Find a weakness. Look at how the computer and the company works. What is broken? What doesnât quite work as planned? Where is the company vulnerable?
- Exploit the vulnerability and get in.
I had a new superpower, a new way of looking at things. In the early 90s, homes didnât have internet connections, and this information wasnât widely known. At the time, I had the morals of a 13-year old boy, so what could I do with this new-found knowledge?
Sat in the computer lab at school it was clear. How could I get into everyone elseâs account? They had passwords⌠but how could I get their passwords? Could I guess them?
Luckily a teacher intervened before I started a life of cybercrime. It was great to learn how computer security worked, but here were the ground rules. We made a deal. I couldnât hack into other studentâs accounts. I could write a programme to guess passwords, but not find out what the âcorrectâ answers were.
I spent months slowly working through a well-thumbed book on how to write programmes in BASIC. Many lunch breaks were spent working out how to write a simple password guesser. Then the day came⌠using a list of words and names I had gathered together, my teacher ran the final test.
My naĂŻve little programme correctly guessed 3 in every 10 passwords on the school network. Hacking a computer wasnât that hard.
What is most surprising, looking back 27 years later is nothing has changed. Searching for how to hack will get you the same basic information. The words have changed a little as cyber security has become militarised, but the outline is the same.
Following the 3 steps, hackers can break-in.
Fresh Security provides a hackerâs view of your organisation.
If you can answer - What can you find out about my company?
If you know - Which weaknesses need fixing?
If you can tell - Who are the highly visible people?
Fresh Security helps you answer all three questions.
Send an email from your business account to risk@freshsec.com.
Weâll automatically enrol you and start searching for your highly visible people.
We use your email address to automatically discover the highly visible people in your team. Search the dark web for stolen passwords and sensitive information, and report back to you immediately. Thereâs a dashboard so you can see the details, and you get weekly and monthly reports to see changes.
You see everything we know for free (no credit card required). And only pay for ongoing monitoring, after youâve seen what we can do.