Hackers refine their head games

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.pioneerplanet.com/tech/ptk_docs/027786.htm

Friday, June 16, 2000

LESLIE BROOKS SUZUKAMO STAFF WRITER

The message on the simple black T-shirts sold by 20-year-old
``Overdose'' from Las Vegas says much of what you need to know about
the three-day computer hacking contest at RootFest.

``My only crime is that of outsmarting you,'' it proclaimed.

RootFest, a convention for Midwest computer hackers being held at St.
Paul's RiverCentre, ends today. Like more conventional conventions, it
has its speakers and seminars, its PowerPoint slide-shows by day and
its entertainment -- a rock band, of course -- set for Thursday night.

But hackers aren't your father's Shriners. Hackers hack. So the
centerpiece of the convention, planted in neat rows of folding tables
in the back of the RiverCentre ballroom, was the hacking competition.
It is a test of caffeinated wits, tricked-up operating systems and
humming hard drives as hackers plugged into an in-house network and
tried to hack each other -- to outsmart the smart.

Think of gladiators without the decapitations and gore, professional
wrestlers in a cage match without the head-butts. It's a three-day
mental slugfest in which each hacker tried to break into as many of
the other contestants computers as possible without allowing his or
her own system to be penetrated.

``Everybody is on their own and just beating the - - - - out of each
other,'' said 17-year-old Dave Aaldering, grinning beneath his
Minnesota Twins baseball cap. Aaldering, a hacker and free-lance
computer consultant who just graduated from high school in the
Netherlands, looks like a 6-foot-plus Opie from ``The Andy Griffith
Show'' but sounds like Jean-Claude Van Damme with a Dutch accent and
an attitude about computer martial arts.

``It's a matter of skills and strength and who's the best. It'll come
out to who's running at the end,'' he said.

It's not just a game, though.

[...]

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