A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools to mask their identities online and pose as criminals. Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. Hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra-legally and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies, and employed by state actors as a weapon of legal and illegal warfare.
Phrack is an e-zine written by and for hackers, first published November 17, 1985. It had a wide circulation which included both hackers and computer security professionals.
L0pht Heavy Industries was a hacker collective active between 1992 and 2000 and located in the Boston, Massachusetts area. The L0pht was one of the first viable hackerspaces in the US, and a pioneer of responsible disclosure. The group famously testified in front of Congress in 1998 on the topic of ‘Weak Computer Security in Government’.
DEF CON is a hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, students, and hackers with a general interest in software, computer architecture, hardware modification, conference badges, and anything else that can be "hacked". The event consists of several tracks of speakers about computer- and hacking-related subjects, as well as cyber-security challenges and competitions. Contests held during the event are extremely varied and can range from creating the longest Wi-Fi connection to finding the most effective way to cool a beer in the Nevada heat.
Kevin Lee Poulsen is an American former black-hat hacker and a contributing editor at The Daily Beast.
Gordon Lyon is an American network security expert, creator of Nmap and author of books, websites, and technical papers about network security. He is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and was Vice President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Jeff Moss, also known as Dark Tangent, is an American hacker, computer and internet security expert who founded the Black Hat and DEF CON computer security conferences.
Harri Harras Hursti is a Finnish computer programmer and former chairman of the board and co-founder of ROMmon, where he supervised in the development of the world's smallest 2-gigabit traffic analysis product that was later acquired by F-Secure Corporation.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is an American researcher and hacker, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is the author of the freely available 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. As of 2012 he resides in Singapore. Huang is a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and a resident advisor and mentor to hardware startups at HAX, an early stage hardware accelerator and venture capital firm.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties.
A computer security conference is a convention for individuals involved in computer security. They generally serve as meeting places for system and network administrators, hackers, and computer security experts.
The Texas Instruments signing key controversy resulted from Texas Instruments' (TI) response to a project to factorize the 512-bit RSA cryptographic keys needed to write custom firmware to TI devices.
Christopher Abad is an American hacker, museum curator, artist, network engineer and programmer. He is best known for his qualitative analysis of specialization stratification in the underground economies related to computer crime.
Limor Fried is an American electrical engineer and owner of the electronics hobbyist company Adafruit Industries. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition, and is known by her moniker ladyada, an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace.
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts." As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 Bitcoins.
HackMiami is a formal organization of information security professionals who host the annual international hacker conference that takes place in Miami Beach, FL known as the 'HackMiami Conference.'
Itzik Kotler is an Israeli entrepreneur, inventor, and information security specialist who is the co-founder and CTO of SafeBreach, an Israeli cybersecurity firm. Kotler was previously the Security Operation Center Team Leader at Tel Aviv-based Radware. He has given multiple talks at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker convention.
Liberating Ourselves Locally is a makerspace/hackerspace in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. It is part of the Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces (BACH).
Iftach Ian Amit is an Israeli Hacker/computer security researcher and practitioner. He is one of the co-founders of the Tel Aviv DEF CON Group DC9723, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard, and presented at hacker conventions such as DEF CON, Black Hat, BlueHat, RSA Conference. He has been named SC Magazine's top experts and featured at Narratively's cover piece on Attack of the Superhackers and is frequently quoted and interviewed
Eva Galperin is the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and technical advisor for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She is noted for her extensive work in protecting global privacy and free speech and for her research on malware and nation-state spyware.
