How scary do you find the prospect of a malicious groups of hackers trying to **** **** up? How about the Chinese government? I read some article recently about the US and China constantly hacking each others ****.

Same two questions but 10 years from now.

just ordered cuckoo's egg and fatal system error, thanks!

ever hack into the matrix?

Good thread.

I think this is increasingly less true. With increasingly pre-packaged user friendly distributions, a perception of greater safety leading to more laxness, and slightly more difficulty finding solutions (since the Windows apps seem to be better known) I could see this getting to be a problem. I run Ubuntu on my home computers, and about the level of detail I've gone into is making sure that the firewall seems well configured and portscanning my machine. I'm sure there's more I could be doing.

Along those lines, what would you suggest as good technical material for a person to read if they were interested in learning more about security? This has been a vague interest of mine for some time but I haven't had a good sense for places to start.

What's your salary?

Have you seen BBS: The Documentary?

For those interested, it's an episodic doc series on the old bulletin board systems. It's in the public domain so you can download it free.

do you guys still use backtrack/slackware for pentests and reverse engineering? or do you have other tools you prefer? was an informatics student before my hormones made me switch to BWL (business studies) - ive been out of the loop for sometime now - its a good thing

I am fascinated by crime, especially computer crime. I read a lot in the news about the ever increasing importance of cyber crime, but those articles always seem to be light on examples except a nebulous reference to identity theft.

How much computer crime is actually occuring? I know that's a hard thing to quantify, but you would probably know the best metric to describe it in.

Will it ever be possible to eradicate computer crime? In terms of hacking/espionage it seems like the structure of the internet will always make anonymity a powerful trump to stopping that sort of crime. Am I wrong in assuming that cyber crime is basically unstoppable without changing the hardware and software of the internet?

At the risk of politarding this thread up, do you think the current laws about cyber crime are appropriate? If not, what is wrong with them? Do you think that the lack of technological knowledge of lawmakers leads to laws that are overly broad in some aspects and miss the point in others?

For example David Kernell, the Sarah Palin email "hacker", was convicted of computer intrusion and the jury deadlocked on identity theft. Considering his methods involved almost nothing technical, just social engineering to guess her password, it doesn't seem like he intruded at all. Its more like she left the key under the mat and he let himself in but didn't take anything. What is your take on this and similar situations?

Where does a beginner go to learn about basic hacking etc? Aside from playing uplink on steam obv

Say I'm an entrepreneur and want to start up my own website. What steps should I take to keep my site safe? Would paying for a sucuri.net subscription be sufficient?

Whoa, cool. I didn't know sandboxie existed, very cool. Does one really need both avg and avast? I only have avira actually, noticed you didn't mention that, does it suck?

I'd be cautious about running too many variants of a/v software at the same time. Even the installers will sometimes warn you about this. As I understand how some of them work, they obtain a lock on a file before you are allowed to open it to scan it for viruses. This can lead to competition for the resource and potientially cause system lockups. Similar issues can be seen on a network basis when running multiple VPN applications.

What are your thoughts on Ejovi Nuwere and his book?

lol love that game. it becomes pointless after you learn how to hack banks to do transfers, unfortunately

so are you one of the "good" guys or the "bad" guys?