The scourge of the internet, really. Personally, I call them script kiddies. Essentially; they use other peoples scripts to “DoS” a website. A number of fine specimens can easily be found on youtube. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVfEoBPV4Nc. What makes this particular example even funnier is that they don’t even understand what is happening, AND they don’t understand why they are so stupid to even try.
Basically, there are two levels of “hacker” now, 99.9% of them are really just script kiddies, who can hardly even understand Batch files, let alone perl. They copy and use scripts (such as the posted youtube video’s kiddie) created by the 0.1%. What makes it all the more interesting is the 0.1% people often are unaware of their code being used this way.
In either case, a DoS attack is so simplistic to the very core that any cheap 20$ router at the local wal-mart can block it; and any sufficiently equipped server can deal with the extra load from a single PC quite easily.
In this particular example, the first web-site mr.kiddie tried was obviously set to reject constant HTTP get requests. I mean- it’s not too hard to mechanically filter out GET requests that come within, say, a second of each other for the same page, and even the most basic server software implements this.
What happened to the second, less developed (apparently) site simply doesn’t have basic safeguards in place, perhaps because they live in a optimistic world where teenagers go out and get jobs instead of sitting on their asses all afternoon trying to take credit for copy-pasting code from other sources in programming languages they only pretend to know in order to take down some site that nobody will miss for the 10 seconds they manage to bring it down, and then they get called to dinner, where their veteran father yells at them for being so god damned lazy and for not mowing the lawn, to which the “experienced hacker” responds, “you’ll be sorry, I’m gonna start the next M$, and you will be begging for dollaz from me pops” and then he get’s grounded.
The “hacker”… or more precisely, the “script kiddie” culture is really quite simple, much like the social structure of one-celled organisms. You have the fat hairy parameciums, and then you have everybody else. their interactions with one another generally involve using made up english words, like “pwned”, and of course replacing as many of the letter s with z’s in a desperate attempt to look cool. Additionally, conversations often just involve them making stuff up.
“Hey, dawg, I just haxxored Oracle, d00d”
“Oh yeah, well I’ve been buyin stuff off ebay for free using my l33t skills”
ad infinitum. Even early on it’s absurd; I mean, my grandmother could hack an Oracle server with two toothpicks and a ceramic bowl, it’s really that easy, Hell, my second cousins guinea pig was able to drop a few tables from one of their badly administered database servers, but that’s not the point.
You know what? I’ve spent a good 5 years trying to shrug this shit off but I’ve grown sick and tired of putting up with arrogant, know it all little shits whose knowledge could be summarized on the head of a pin. I’m SICK of hearing about how “talented” little Billy is, and then looking at the code only to mistakenly believe little billy designed his code to emulate that mysterious sack of mould in the back of my fridge. Why do I hate this so much? Do I need a really good reason to hate it? really? because honestly I think the problem damn near hates itself, in a manner of speaking.
To make things worse, not only is little Billy a arrogant little prick, but his own ego is fed by his own family members, “Oh, little billy is a genius! He found the file menu in Word, He’s gonna be the next bill gates!” No, Uncle Tom, Billy Didn’t find the fucking file menu, your just too retarded to see whats right in front of you. Do I get points for pointing out a lawn chair for you to sit in when your sitting in it? No, I don’t, and I really don’t think billy should be proud of himself for pointing out the obvious, instead he should feel pity for somebody so stupid they cannot understand a basic UI and then evangelize the person who comes to point out the obvious.
The problem with the entire thing is, either they “have it” or they don’t, and the longer they fester, with no real skills, seated on their high pedestal because they mistakenly believe that employers will come to them after they barely graduate from high school, because of that awesome space shooter program they made in Visual Basic 2.0 and released on a shoddy geocities web site. Is the longer they don’t gain any skills whatsoever, and the higher the chances that they will be struck down, working as a custodian in their local elementary school. Having been forced to realize that they aren’t bloody geniuses, that copy-pasting other peoples code is plagiarism, not “leet skills” and that they really, really, really, have a lot more respect for their old schools custodian.
Another issue- and this applies globally to programmers,software developers and those that want to pretend they are one of those two, is that they mistakenly believe they have reached a “plateau of greatness” or skill; No programmer, no matter how much experience, cannot learn something new; and it’s far too common that you have people, fresh out of college, or high school, or whatever, that think that because they read the programmers guide included with Visual basic 2.0 that they can crank out AJAX applications; this simply is not the case. It’s not a plateau- it’s a group of infinitely rising mesas, and joy of programming comes from climbing those mesas, every once in a while looking back, and realizing just how far you’ve come; just remember to do one thing before you start feeling satisfied; look up, and realize just how far you have to go.
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