you could read this original piecehere.
I remember when my parents bought our first home computer.
It was somewhere in the 80s and I was about 67 years old.
I remember looking at this mysterious box and thinking to myself,how does it work?
Are there little people living inside the box doing all the work for us?
My first instinct was to open it and attempt to see these little beings at work.
Its only well into my adult life that I started to learn programming.
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In one of the presentations, some students were asked to talk about security issues related to SQL.
They talked briefly about SQL injections and cross-site scripting but I felt this was all very theoretical for them.
So I asked, Did you try it?
Try what?, they asked back.
Did you try creating a small database you could break into?
Did you find a practical code example vulnerable to an injection?
And, well, they hadnt.
Hacking and hackers today have a very bad reputation.
As a result, hacker culture has become vastly misunderstood.
Its true that security in cyberspace has never before been such an important concern.
Its a dangerous world out there on the internet.
But throughout all this rapid evolution, its important to remember how it all started.
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So, what exactly did hacking mean back in those days?
What are the ideologies that drove the creation of what we know now as hacker culture?
Hacking meant living in a world full of possibilities where the question what if?
drove people to important discoveries and innovations.
Hacking was about experimenting and most of all, hacking was FUN.
Breaking stuff was a way to better understand the technologies surrounding us.
So what does this mean for us as developers today?
To me, understanding security in utility development comes from the exact same attitude I described earlier.
Everything we create is built on top of someone elses work.
Hey, were all human!
I love this quote from the TV show Mr.
Robot:
A bug is never just a mistake.
It represents something bigger.
An error of thinking.
That makes you who you are.Elliot Anderson
So how can we develop a healthy hacker mindset?
The answer is simple: start breaking things!
Hack something (legally, of course!).
Build something small and then make a run at break it.
How can I exploit this?
And all that while having a great amount of fun!
Story by.cult
.cult by Honeypot is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
