Quote:
Originally Posted by pig4bill
And you're thinking at a completely different level than what a government is capable of. You're talking about someone hiding, and connecting to the public internet with a pc. When you have total control of a node and routers you can construct the packets any way you want and drop them into the internet in any fashion you want. There is no "pattern" of a machine, because a pc didn't create them in the first place.
Besides, even if they did something as weak as what you're talking about, they would have to be the stupidest hackers on earth. They would just trash the old hardware and buy new hardware for each hack. A pc box is a couple hundred bucks.
No, I have never been talking about that. Your own vision of how this stuff works was much closer to that, however. Your own misunderstanding of these concept is apparent when you are talking about "nodes and routers" as if they follow different rules. They don't, they're computers and they play by the protocol rules of the internet like every other device connected to it.
Your post gives the impression that a hacker can hold complete control of communication flow. That's not how the internet works. It's not a clandestine world of secret passageways, it's a network of millions of intersecting highways where any intersection or tap can monitor all traffic that passes through it. Total control of how information flows is only possible if you control all the infrastructure including your target, which - outside the realm of hypotheticals and completely uninteresting theory - you don't.
Hacking a public target is somewhere somewhere between pick-pocketing in times square or robbing a bank in broad daylight. And regardless of well you hide or how many layers you put up between yourself and the crime, you are generating traffic, and a lot of that traffic is accessible after the fact. This is also why any hacking effort's number one weakness is signal analysis: No act on the internet is "private", you can cloak what you're saying in onion layers of obfuscation - but you can't hide saying it, and all those onion layers are accessible for a listener to peel. And listening on the internet is a
very trivial task.
And you certainly can't "construct the packets in any way you want". Packets are analogous to letters within a layer of envelopes. They need a certain construction, every envelope require a certain construction, every item needs a certain addressing, they need to fit into some criteria of form. For them to garner specific responses, they need to carry information in some way that is understandable to delivery services and the receiver, and for that they need to follow certain protocols.
Last edited by tame_deuces; 12-31-2016 at 06:47 AM.