Re: Fwd: Fear and Loathing in Information Security

[Dragos Ruiu <dr () kyx net>]

On February 11, 2005 11:50 pm, Anthony Zboralski wrote:
> The speech that set me off took place at a local meeting of an
> information security professional organization, and the presenter
> represented a well-known vendor of intrusion-detection software. During
> his lengthy address this person called competing security researchers
> "ankle-biters," suggested most users in Brazil are "miscreants," and
> expressed a desire to use an Apache helicopter to "take all those
> morons out" (apparently meaning hackers in general). While he was at it
> he referred to Eastern Europe as a "country," ridiculed the weight
> problems of several young computer criminals, and generally displayed
> what struck me as truly remarkable levels of bigotry, anger, and
> ignorance.

Just like scientists have been reviled as "witches" and other
forms of fear of the unknown being masked with hatred throughout
human history, most of the time when I see someone in infosec 
reviling "hackers" it's someone who can't code, masking their 
fear of those who understand enough to do things that for them  
are mysterious.

Instead of picking up a book and learning assembler, their
reaction is to label it as "black magic" and therefore "bad."
Guess that must be easier... Oh well, I guess I should be glad
that those kinds of attitudes make the knowledge of those 
of us who do bother to learn programming skills more valuable.

cheers,
--dr

-- 
World Security Pros. Cutting Edge Training, Tools, and Techniques
Vancouver, Canada       May 4-6 2005  http://cansecwest.com
pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp
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