Steve

Cw 6th hour
4-27
Its everywhere, the Internet is integrated into most of our devices: our tvs, phones,
cars. And just as many other things comes in pairs, the convenience of the Internet comes
with dangers-hackers, viruses, spyware. Just like in the colonial days, the internet is
unexplored and wild. But the similarities dont end there. It wasnt until large masses of
people became dissatisfied with where they live did the frontier start to become conquered.
The Internet is reaching that point where people are flocking to it. But did the pioneers take
guns that were half built? No they did not, and we shouldnt leave our weapons-the next
generation of white hat, or moral, hackers-without the most experience that we can give
them. Parents and the government need to realize that restricting access to the Internet is
like sending soldiers with absolutely no training or-more accurately-the wrong training (like
telling them to point the gun the wrong way). It just does not work. People need unrestricted
access to prevent hidden exploits, encourage growth in abilities, and fortify the first modern
culture that thrives without guidance; instead we should look for a physical solution.
Hackers come in different categories called hats. There are three main hats that
describe the types of morals held by a hacker. White hats are the moral hackers that are
trained and hired legally to hack and are normally the people who work for companies.
Black hats are the immoral criminal hackers that people hear about when companies have
information stolen. Grey hats are those not hired. They often break into a site, contact the
owner, and offer to fix the flaws that they used to break in for a cost. Spyware is an invisible
program often used by the government to block commands from being executed, or to
collect data from a computer. Viruses are programs that act just like their biological

namesake. They infect a computer and can do anything from change letters in files to the
purpose of an entire program.
In the late 1990s, a law was passed to support the media companies by protecting
their products from being copied. The same law prevents DVD users from skipping the
federal warnings at the beginning of a movie. When you ask your computer to do
something reasonable, you expect it to say, Yes, master (or possibly Are you sure?), not I
CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT, DAVE. If the I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT, DAVE message is
being generated by a program on your desktop labeled HAL9000.exe, you will certainly
drag that program into the trash. If your computer's list of running programs shows
HAL9000.exe lurking in the background like an immigration agent prowling an arrivals hall,
looking for sneaky cell phone users to shout at, you will terminate that process with a
satisfied click. (Doctorow) This was just a temporary fix. Now the same law allows software
companies to lazily make certain files invisible to file browsers to make them harder to be
uninstalled by the average Joe. It was not a long time before the less desirable crowd
found that if a file had a certain sequence of letters in the name of a file, the computer would
run it, but the user would not know about it. And with automated cars, robotic body parts,
and other ways humans are becoming more technologically dependent, is a law that allows
the computer that drives your car to lock up because you tried to do something that the
DMCA did not allow, really a good idea- or is it a deadly mistake?
What if it was illegal to perform and compose music during the 1700s, the time of
Mozart? Would he still have been the prodigy that we know him as? What prodigies are we
preventing by restricting our youth from fully experiencing technology? Technology allows
us to communicate across the world like were right next to each other, we can create,
explore, or destroy our own worlds countless times. We can look at what we are made of
and what is made of us all because of an idea that was once unimagined. By limiting access

to tech, these ideas are being restricted. A barrier is being created between that one person
who makes the most wonderful idea, and the one person needed to make it bloom. By
restricting tech, common people are prevented from discovering how it works, making some
people-malicious and benign-find a great advantage. The equivalent of someone leaving a
locked briefcase with their lifes savings with a complete stranger and telling them to hang
onto it. The best way to protect oneself from cyber intrusion is to learn how to hack.
Users on the Internet are faceless, and on the flip side, blind to everything about you
that you dont want to say. In an environment that lets someone be a completely new
person based off of personality rather than skin tone or gender, is it no wonder that in the
tech sector, the pay gap between men and women is one of the smallest. (Miller) Why dont
the users that practically live on the Internet agree with governments making laws about the
Internet? Its because it is like Ukraine. Created by a government, but the Internet has
grown too fast for the government to control. And now that things have calmed down, the
government wants to take control again.
Instead of looking to the Internet for ways to fix problems with the dangers of the
Internet, look at the people creating them. Look at the people isolated and dejected who
turned to the Internet for revenge. And stop encouraging them to join the dark side by taking
away their source of joy. It is the physical rejection removing any love for peers, not violent
video games, that cause tragedies by kids: Its about jocks picking on geeks.(Katz, 141)

Works Cited

Doctorow, Carl. "How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm | WIRED."
Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer-security/>.
Katz, Jon. Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho. New York: Villard
Books, 2000. Print.
Miller, Claire Cain. For Women In Tech, Pay Gap Is Unusually Small. The New York
Times. The New York Times, 2014. Web. 3 May 2015.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/upshot/flexibility-is-the-reason-for-a-smallerpay-gap-in-tech-work.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0>
Steve Sykora
5/1
Poem
CW 6th Hunter
Eye for an Eye
I always thought that
there was a wrong to right.(1)
I had big dreams
but bullies would never
profit from me.
I became a
star spangled target,
because my family
dared to move.
I never did them harm.
My skin is the same color.
I speak the same language.
Where I was born
was only a six hour difference.
Why did they bullied me?
Some believe in karma,
some in forgiving all.
But why did they still not see
that the foreign child,
that bleeding,
miserable,

wizzkid child (1)

had the skill to ruin their lives,
but wont.
The govt was the same,
but this time was different.
It was easy copying files,
files that they gave me.
It was easy hitting
that small button label save.
I made them see.
See that everyone
has a breaking point
and I hope I taught
them never to be
the mosquito biting an arm.
1:Glasgow

"'Hacker behind leaks' is former bullying victim." Herald [Glasgow, Scotland] 2 Dec. 2010:
11.Infotrac Newsstand. Web. 1 May 2015.

steve sykora
5/6/15
Cw 6th hour
genre 3
Savag3d
It was a normal morning, I got up, made some coffee and drove to work: nothing
special. Arriving at my workplace, I said hello to the lady at the reception desk and walked
into the elevator.

As soon as the doors opened, Sam, my co-worker exclaimedRobert, youre just the
person that we need!
What is going on? Why is IT running around like chickens with their heads chopped
off?
Someone hacked into the network last night and locked everyone out. Youre the
only one with the password to reset the network. Maybe you can get us access again by
wiping the network and then manually adding everyone back on. He handed my a list of
everyone whose accounts would need to be restored. That was top priority, finding who did
this would have to come second.
We can give it a try. I say as I sit at a desktop.
After several minutes of trying to get everyone back online, I realise that the reset
password would not work. I also found how the hacker got in. Some how he got in through
my account and changed all the passwords and encrypted all the files. At least he didnt
delete everything. I relay this information to Sam.
He sighs, This is bad, we may be dealing with a manual version of ransomware.
I hate ransomware, normally what happens is somebody clicks a link and the entire
network sees the same screen saying that if they dont send this amount to this account
within 24 hours, all the files will be deleted. What about the rollover files?
We tried that already. This months rollover happened this morning after the
encryption, and we didnt think to keep two months of files.

We were out of options, we had to contact the person who hacked our system. We
set up two hour shifts so there would always be two or three people waiting for a message
to appear. I took the one am to three am shift because that was the time that we think that
the hacker got in, so it may be the time that he is active.
I was right, at 2:42 all the monitors lit up with a text file that the hacker opened for us.
He instructed me that he wanted 500,000 dollars of he would sell the company secrets on
the blackmarket. I pressed a button to see if he would let me type to him, it worked. I
negotiated him down to 150,000 dollars saying that we just sent in money for the
renovations next week, a half truth. I what his handle is so we could find him after we got his
money, again, not entirely true. I really wanted his name to identify him. He typed in return
Savag3d. If I take the 3 and replace it with an e, I get Savaged, a minor hacker I had
only just heard about doing what he has already down to me, steal files from companies.
My thoughts were running, I had a name, I called my wife at home and asked her to
post a message on my Facebook and Twitter accounts offering a reward thirty seven
bitcoins for the proof of the arrest of Savag3d. Then to tell me the URL for me to type to
Savaged. My plan worked, he say the message, and realized that the people who work for
bitcoins normally are not completely legal, more on the side of homicidal. I used the coins
that the company earned from people paying for objects from our website.
Within an hour the files were restored and I the passwords reset to what they were.
Now I just need to explain to my boss what happened. I am going to need a lot more coffee
for that.
Stephen Sykora
5/10

CW 6th Hunter
Genre 4
PSA
Hey you! Yes, you. That save password button your about to hit- yeah, you dont want to hit
that. Clicking that button means someone only needs one password to access all the sites
that you click it on. Sounds a lot like the purpose of that button, but what if that someone is
not you. Think about it, one password- normally under 16 characters- that a friend, or
hacker, could probably guess by learning about you through the info that you shouldnt have
posted by that you did any way because everyone does. Dont think it will happen to you,
ask Roger Ver- who was hacked because someone guessed that one password.

password: https://blog.kaspersky.com/false-perception-of-it-security-passwords/
exclamation: http://www.123rf.com/photo_14684240_abc-series--water-liquid-punctuationmarks--exclamation-mark.html
save button: http://www.triketalk.com/forum/threads/25214-****Special-on-Visor-Headightsamp-Headlight-Relo-Kits****
biohazard: http://wallpaperest.com/green-biohazard-symbol-tda-wallpaper-106537
thief with keys: (coming soon)

Stephen Sykora
5-15
genre 5
Journal entries
CW 6th Hunter
Red Honey
August 4, 2011

Today, a defense contractor, that thinks that they have been hacked, has hired me to set up
a early warning system for their network- what irony. It is quite lucrative as well, offering
nearly $50,000 for a job that would take less than a month, and first-class flight to Iowa
payed for.
August 6, 2011
I arrived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa today and was immediately greeted at the airport by a full
security detail, Rockwell Collins Inc really knows how to spoil guests. From a quick debrief,
the company thinks that a foreign country wants to steal government intel through the
company. I plan on setting up a system called a honey pot, a fake branch of the network
made to look like it contains a variety of likely targets.
August 10, 2011
Everything is set up, a dozen of computers filled with content designed to draw hackers
infiltrated looking for games, movies, free videos, and intel- none of it is real. The best part
of it was that within hours of setting up this system, an employ tried to access the intel
section of our trap. This is great for me, not so much for the spy. After we find out who, well
watch and try to find out who the spy is sending the information to.
August 20, 2011
We found her! She worked in the room next door, in accounting. She was a short term
Russian spy. When we found out who the spy was, we searched her computer after she left
for the day. We found a wireless computer chip designed for short range data transfer. So
the security team and I set up camp with a wireless sniffer tuned to the frequency of the
spys chip in an attempt to find her partner. We eventually picked up a signal yesterday, but
it led to a room packed with people with computers- and we didnt have the legal right to
search everyone in the room. My employer decided to cut its losses and sent in security and
turned in the spy to the FBI. Who knew that a network security person would catch a
Russian spy.

Bibliography
Bisson, David. "Inside The Mind Of A Former Black Hat Hacker." The State of Security. Tripwire.com, 18
Mar. 2015. Web. 01 May 2015. <http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/featured/inside-the-mindof-a-former-black-hat-hacker/>.
Devlin, Kate."'Hacker behind leaks' is former bullying victim." Herald [Glasgow, Scotland] 2 Dec. 2010:
11.Infotrac Newsstand. Web. 19 May 2015.http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE

%7CA243385031&v=2.1&u=lom_accessmich&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w&asid=f897cdf28c41a99504837
8e97fe5ae19
(Hacker bullied (all databases))
Doctorow, Carl.How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us To Greater Harm | WIRED. Wired.com.
Conde Nast Digital, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. <http://www.wired.com/2014/12/governmentcomputer-security/>
Grimes, Roger A. "True Tales of (mostly) White-hat Hacking." InfoWorld. N.p., 22 July 2013. Web. 14 May
2015. <http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611029/data-security/true-tales-of--mostly--white-hathacking.html>.
Katz, Jon. Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho. New York: Villard Books, 2000.
Print.
Miller, Claire Cain. For Women In Tech, Pay Gap Is Unusually Small. The New York Times. The New
York Times, 2014. Web. 3 May 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/upshot/flexibility-is-thereason-for-a-smaller-pay-gap-in-tech-work.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0>
Zetter, Kim.NSA Laughs At PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches | WIRED. Wired.com. Conde
Nast Digital, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. <http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/>