Laurie Copans
About 350 computer hackers from around the world fought off security interrogations, attempts to silence them and an all-round bad image to complete the first hacker convention in Israel last Thursday.
The two-day Tel Aviv gathering, which included “hack these sites” and “spot the feds” competitions, was the first such gathering since hackers disabled the Yahoo and eBay sites in February.
At the request of MPs, the police had considered banning the conference, but the attorney general, Eliyakim Rubinstein, gave it the go-ahead. However, the police did prevent the organisers publishing a list of Israeli commercial websites vulnerable to break-in.
To compile the list, participants attacked sites offered by Israeli companies. The site owners were confident that no one could thwart them, but were proved wrong. The hackers said that 28% of the Israeli Internet was vulnerable.
One of the hackers, John Draper of Freemont, California, said they wanted to put a better face on the practice. “A hacker is developing programs to make them better,” he said. “They aren’t people who break into computer systems. That’s a cracker.”
Draper helped to launch the hacker phenomenon in 1971 when he discovered that a toy whistle reproduced the tone needed to open a free telephone line.