Why Linux is unhackable

[AlphaObeisance]

If one is able to do that they're as well able to modify the code for malicious purposes as well, there's really no difference, same thing but different goals.

People seem to underestimate how easy it actually is. People imagine "hacking" as some kind of bad actor spending sleepless nights trying to brute force their way through someone's firewall when in reality in today's world people generally will just hold the window open for you ignorantly.

I motion to approve standardizing the re-labeling of "hacking" to "Social-Engineering". No need to brute force your way in if you can pretend to be the janitor and they just open the door for you.

If only hacking were as cool as seen on TV baha. Please hold while I open cmatrix on the side panels so I can make sure I've got my super hacker hat on!

 

[MikeWalsh]

@AlphaObeisance :-

If only hacking were as cool as seen on TV baha. Please hold while I open cmatrix on the side panels so I can make sure I've got my super hacker hat on!

Indeedy...!!

(Yuk, yuk, yuk...)

Lololol!!!


Mike.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

People seem to underestimate how easy it actually is. People imagine "hacking" as some kind of bad actor spending sleepless nights trying to brute force their way through someone's firewall when in reality in today's world people generally will just hold the window open for you ignorantly.

Yeah, hacking regular users is not hard, with social engineering being the most common and easiest attack type, I can tell you how to and you can do it in matter of days, no coding skills needed, just about 100-200 bucks to buy a crypter and you're ready to go.

However I've read recently how real stuff happens in groups, there are various hacker groups and even governments have groups, what's special for groups they have small teams within a group each dedicated to specific area, like crypto hackers, web hackers etc.
Together they can target bigger fish but one person alone will have difficulties to be expert in all areas and difficulty to do anything big without spending months.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

i have to add that a few months ago. somebody started a topic on this site. begging for help with restoring ubuntu. because he must have downloaded a script. then either he ran it without checking out what it was. or it ran on its own. which forced him to relog. or brutally ended his desktop session.

if linux were not hackable. something like that wouldn't have been possible. anyway, that's what the proponents of "immutable" and "walled garden" operating systems are seeking.

btw that "matrix rain" screen. i have made a variation of it. while i had slackel. used "scrot" to take a snapshot of the desktop. then used that as the background that "melted down."

 

[wendy-lebaron]

If only hacking were as cool as seen on TV baha. Please hold while I open cmatrix on the side panels so I can make sure I've got my super hacker hat on!

pretty stupid to me. in one program aired on nbc-new york. that were supposed to have fbi as protagonists. having two chances to break into an usb stick. then succeeding it just threw documents at the screen mindlessly. because it has to be shown that way. to people who think hackers are deities. only if hackers were mortal, put them to death. "i'd harness them for world conquest. for me, me, me, this deep in my mind."

 

[osprey]

People seem to underestimate how easy it actually is. People imagine "hacking" as some kind of bad actor spending sleepless nights trying to brute force their way through someone's firewall when in reality in today's world people generally will just hold the window open for you ignorantly.

I motion to approve standardizing the re-labeling of "hacking" to "Social-Engineering". No need to brute force your way in if you can pretend to be the janitor and they just open the door for you.

If only hacking were as cool as seen on TV baha. Please hold while I open cmatrix on the side panels so I can make sure I've got my super hacker hat on!

"Hacking" as "social engineering", reminded me of an incident here a little time ago with a colleague. The guy was a 75 year old who had recently subscribed to a dating site. He was contacted by a 39 year old woman who said she was interested in him after having read his profile with his photo on the dating website. She sent a photo of herself, which was ravishingly beautiful, and he soon became smitten. They began a correspondence using the dating site's email facility, but then quickly moved to the more private Telegram app at her request. The guy at first couldn't believe that such a young woman would have an interest in a man his age. He wrote to her about this saying that when he would be 85 and in his dotage, she would be 50 and in her prime! It didn't deter her. She said that age has no boundaries for love, and she felt, having read his profile, that they could truly be a couple.

The Telegram app has an AI assistant, which offered itself for assisting with correspondence, which the guy rejected. He noticed, however, that some of the language the woman used seemed a little formal, just like AI text can get. He ran some of the woman's correspondence through an online AI detector and it concluded that the text was 100% AI and 0% human. He wondered whether the woman was perhaps not a native English speaker and therefore using the Telegram AI, so he wrote back to her mentioning that her text was thought to be AI generated, and asking her about her native language, and also asking her if she would not use AI. She wrote back saying that "yes" she had used the Telegram AI assistant to correct her grammar and spelling, and that she was happy not to use that AI.

The correspondence continued. The woman was continually acknowledging her deepening interest and the growth of love, but the guy noticed that the terminology being used had changed very little. He proposed that they meet. She agreed, but said she needed time to arrange it. He asked her about herself and she provided some details. She said she was a hairdresser who was trying to set up her own business by gathering equipment she need to buy, and that she was waiting for her inheritance to come through.

The mention of inheritance was the first mention of anything financial, and it acted like a red flag for the guy, so he put the rest of the correspondence through the AI detector, and again the output was that it was all AI generated. At this point, he replied to the "woman" telling her of his finding and that he would leave the relationship altogether. "She" wrote back that he was wrong, that "she" was genuine! Her pleas continued through several exchanges. He was however not convinced and believed the AI detector more than he believed her, so he left.

It was a very exciting experience for my colleague who shared it with me because of my modest interests in AI I guess. In relation to "hacking" it occurred to me that there were a number of applications of the term in this man's experience, including "social engineering".

How does one hack AI to be a scammer? That would involve some interesting manipulations I thought which alone could be interesting hacking of the negative kind. A potentially damaging hack though was into the guy's brain. His mind was hacked into for a short period whilst he was entranced at the possibility of a romance with such a beautiful young woman. These things do happen on Earth, so why not for him? That fantasy was the "brain hack" I guess. Altogether though, the AI may have been used to perpetrate a scam which itself was a case of "social engineering", but it was also AI, in the form of the online AI detector, which actually rescued him from a possible personal disaster. The social engineering aspect, relying on his personal vulnerability, had been greatly enhanced by the new technology of AI. AI can be a hacker too. When the Mythos AI hunts through code finding vulnerabilities and creating "proof of concept" code in the form of exploits, I guess it's also hacking. It's a new world I thought.

 

[AlphaObeisance]

I think the only thing I'd note on the whole AI detection thing is that AI was trained using human context; and has repeatedly been caught red handed accusing authors of using AI to write their publications which existed before the rise of general use Artificial Intelligence.

While it did your colleague a solid in sparing him of the gold digging scam; I'd be hard pressed to trust AI to verify that anything was or was not written in AI.

I've seen several reports that have pretty much destroyed my faith in AI detection almost entirely. On one hand, IT experts the world over screamed at the top of their lungs that AI could not be relied on for production, while in the same breath they've preached the gospel of AI for AI detection; it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Suppose it doesn't matter anyway. The world over hated debit cards with a passion when they first come about; and today, you can hardly function in modern societies without one; now we're transitioning to mobile pay. No doubt AI will be the same. Everyone hated it, now it's so good nobody can distinguish AI from Man; quite literally you could post any work by Picasso on any social media site and tell people it was AI generated and ask their thoughts; and people will start foaming at the mouth and speak nothing good of it despite the fact it was legitimately painted.

The future is going to be a scary place indeed. But I certainly won't be relying on AI to tell me that AI is AI haha. Ideally I'll just disconnect or drop dead before my faith in humanity is lost to that extent.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

"Hacking" as "social engineering", reminded me of an incident here a little time ago with a colleague. ...

both the machine and the "other side" could be mistaken. there's only one who is perfect. never a human nor something built with human hands.

the "other side" could have lied further. to be even younger. but with a difference of three decades. well, it was reasonable.

i don't think the guy was ready to commit in any way. trusting too much in the machine that could fail. if he were he should have kept daring the "other side." to present "herself" if it's really a "young" woman. or in the least demonstrate some honesty. reveal in real life once and for all. it's not about another machine that could fail.

the "other side" would have kept making excuses. unless "she" saw any real money. because this is what "successful" social networking entails. someone every week allows himself/herself. taken advantage of because he/she "needs" to get married. "must" get into a dating service or something alike. to demonstrate a personal weakness. which cannot be hidden easily thereafter on internet.

if this were about a guy nearly 50 years. with a woman barely 30 years old. a witness could have expected a scandal to occur. a certain "big" social-networking site actually induced. four or five people each one to commit hideous crimes. of possession/obession and were prosecuted for them. alternatively, one side always ripped off and shown off. while the other celebrates like expected entirely from "script-kiddie."

a man could be lured these days. by the picture of an anime girl. never mind some lesser-known model being misrepresented. how many people on this site? and others put photographs of himself/herself? because one of those persons. completely understood internet is a tool. not a virtual reality avenue to escape from real life.

i'm sorry i sound like philosopher or psychologist. without depth in any field.

 

[enginetown]

Linux quite literally has the best community of bug fixer that will spend time to make sure their systems arent insecure it works because people want their own systems to be safe.

 

[APTI]

Why linux is mostly unhackable ?
and also MacOS also unhackable why ??
all windows linux and macos are just OS but windows is mostly hackable
why windows not use Linux or MacOS strategy

let me give you the historical look at this....

Windows began as DOS. it was a single user on a computer and if somebody was hacking you they were probably sitting in your lap. Makes it easy to detect. So security was not a big issue or concern. Windows was made as a graphical front end for DOS. It allowed multiple users and programs on the single user DOS base. In the beginning it was also secure because to hack it you had to be on the computer. But windows evolved as programs do. To think of this in other terms, windows became a bunch of bailing wire and duct tape making things work but always comes down to the core that it was designed from DOS. Windows was never designed to be secure, so everything you see is mostly a facade of safety.
Linux comes from UNIX which was designed in a multi user environment from the start. So security was in the core of the system. You had multiple users on the same computer at the same time so it had to have security out of the gate. So all the linux evolutions came from that base where multiple users and security were always a concern. Apple is an off shoot of linux so it followed mostly the same principle.
If you look at the core of the systems as I described, you will see why windows is so insecure. You can do like microsoft and build a porche around a lawn mower engine and even make it drive nice, but it is still a lawn mower engine.

This may be a bit over simplified and I am sure others will throw in all the complexities but that is the basics of why windows is so easy to break. And why they can't change it. The lawn mower engine can't be removed.