

Top Black Hat Hackers - allinhtml
http://www.improgrammer.net/top-10-black-hat-hackers/

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I have some issues with this list.

1\. If we know who they are, are they really the best? David Smith is, as the
article says, the only person to go to jail for writing a Macro virus, the
past time of script kiddies everywhere (at one point at least; I'm not sure if
you can still perform the necessary tricks with overwriting the default
template, etc). I find that rather telling.

2\. I would never call Hotz a "Black Hat" for hacking on hardware he owned. I
wouldn't describe RTM, Lamo, or James that way either, though they accessed
systems that weren't theres. Only three of the people on this list sought any
kind of material gain; the rest of them have questionable ethics, but are
mostly motivated by curiosity. Even McKinnon, for whom black hat is probably a
fitting epitaph, was in search of information he believed was being unjustly
withheld from the public.

Maybe this is just me, but I think of someone as a black hat if they are out
to do harm; to destroy systems, steal money, or sap resources.

3\. Maybe this is a nitpick, but packet sniffing is a passive attack by
someone with access to a router, switch, WiFi encryption keys, etc. ARP
spoofing is an active attack performed by ordinary hosts on the same LAN as
the target that can achieve similar goals.

