Script Kiddies Research Articles

Generative AI Increases Cybersecurity Risks for Seniors

We evaluate how generative AI exacerbates the cyber risks faced by senior citizens. We assess the risk that powerful LLMs can easily be misconfigured to serve a malicious purpose, and that platforms such as HackGPT or WormGPT can facilitate low-skilled script kiddies to replicate the effectiveness of high-skilled threat actors. We surveyed 85 seniors and found that the combination of loneliness and low cyber literacy places 87% of them at high risk of being hacked. Our survey further revealed that 67% of seniors have already been exposed to potentially exploitable digital intrusions and only 22% of seniors have sufficient awareness of risks to ask techno-literate for remedial assistance. Our risk analysis suggests that existing attack vectors can be augmented with AI to create highly personalized and believable digital exploits that are extremely difficult for seniors to distinguish from legitimate interactions. Technological advances allow for the replication of familiar voices, live digital reconstruction of faces, personalized targeting, and falsification of records. Once an attack vector is identified, certain generative polymorphic capabilities allow rapid mutation and obfuscation to deliver unique payloads. Both inbound and outbound risks exist. In addition to inbound attempts by individual threat actors, seniors are vulnerable to outbound attacks through poisoned LLMs, such as Threat GPT or PoisonGPT. Generative AI can maliciously alter databases to provide incorrect information or compromised instructions to gullible seniors seeking outbound digital guidance. By analyzing the extent to which senior citizens are at risk of exploitation through new developments in AI, the paper will contribute to the development of effective strategies to safeguard this vulnerable population.

Improving Internet of Things Vulnerability Disclosure and Coordination

Abstract Internet of Things (“IoT”), specifically in the consumer space, describes an environment where consumer devices, connected to the Internet in a smart home, communicate to each other directly or through the cloud. Cheap manufacturing and a fast-growing market brought billions such devices in everyday homes, and consequently new concerns emerged about their security. The complexity added by these new systems, with fragmented in-house hardware and software platforms, have been recently the target of both scrutiny and controversy. When IoT devices get hacked it’s no longer just “script kiddies” and part-time hackers, it’s state actors and national security on the line. Where for PCs there is a robust cybersecurity product market (eg. “antivirus”), the majority of IoT devices in households are designed with little or no regard towards cybersecurity and the typical consumer’s understanding of how to secure these is lacking. Effective ways to safeguard IoT products are bug bounties, programs that offer a financial reward to anyone discovering vulnerabilities, but they are costly and hard to manage, thus usually adopted by more mature companies. All manufacturers can additionally benefit from responsible vulnerability disclosure, or ethical hacking, where researchers attempt to find vulnerabilities for recognition or as a public service. Unfortunately disclosing and coordinating vulnerability research challenges are downplayed. This paper proposes to investigate impact, discuss time considerations, and suggest potential solutions for consumers, companies, and regulators to mitigate and improve IoT vulnerability reporting, fixing and disclosure.

ANALYSIS OF CURRENT THREATS TO THE INFORMATION SECURITY OF ORGANIZATIONSAND THE FORMATION OF THE INFORMATION PLATFORM AGAINST THEM

Taking into account the process of complication of the geopolitical and geoeconomic landscape space, the development of information technologies and the formation of new security challenges associated with the emergence of new cyber threats, there is a need for constant monitoring and forecasting of them in order to prevent consequences in the form of damage and leakage of valuable and confidential information. The authors analyzed the new predictable cyber security threats to organizations, with special attention paid to the protection of endpoints. Threats identified in the field of artificial intelligence development (underground development of malicious Large Language Models (LLM); “Script Kiddies” update; voice fraud for social engineering, which is created by artificial intelligence); changing trends in the behavior of threat actors (attacks on supply chains against managed file transfer solutions, malware threats that are becoming multilingual); as new emerging threats and attack methods (growing QR code rivalry; stealth attacks on peripheral devices; Python implementation in Excel creating a potentially new vector for attacks; LOL drivers changing action algorithms). The resulting detection of future threats emphasizes the need for strategic planning for the adoption of new technologies and platforms: such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capabilities, as well as the use of EDR as part of a multi-instrumented enhanced detection and response (XDR) architecture. Gartner’s research has been proven to have a tremendous impact on improving organizations’ threat detection capabilities by providing valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each cybersecurity service provider with respect to emerging threat intelligence, by focusing organizations’ attention on opportunities to identify gaps in their existing security infrastructure and adopt sound decisions to invest in additional solutions or services that effectively address these gaps. The spheres of activity of the world’s leading companies were analyzed, their connection with Ukrainian companies was found, and further cooperation was proposed for the effective protection of national cyberspace.

RESEARCH PAPER ON CYBERSECURITY

We live in the digital era. We use the internet and electronic media for paying bills, purchasing any items, watching a movie, doctor’s prescription, ordering food, and everything else. Due to this widespread use, there are innumerable incidents of security breach, fraud, malicious attack, etc. reported. To keep the internet age well-ordered and safe for users we need cybersecurity. It protects you from cyber-criminals, hackers, criminal syndicates, insiders, script kiddies, hacktivists and anybody who wants to damage you or your asset financially, mentally or engage in data theft online.

Siber Terör ve DDoS

Siber terörizm eylemlerinde etkili bir araç olarak kullanılan DDoS saldırıları 1980’li yıllarda amatör bilgisayar korsanları (script kiddies) tarafından oyun/gösteriş amaçlı gerçekleştirilmeye başlamıştır. Bu saldırılar ile ciddi ekonomik zararlar verebileceğini fark eden siber suçlular, 90’lı yıllarda DDoS saldırılarını elektronik ticaret şirketlerinden şantaj ile para kazanma aracı olarak kullanmaya başlamışlardır. 2000’li yıllarda ise DDoS siber protesto ve saldırı aracı olarak kullanılmaktadır. Bu çalışmada DDoS saldırılarının gerçekleştirilme nedenleri tarihsel değişimi ile incelenmektedir. Ayrıca; DDoS saldırılarını gerçekleştirmekte kullanılan yöntemler, kategorize edilip örnekler ile anlatılmaktadır. DDoS ’un bir siber terör aracı olarak nasıl kullanıldığı açıklanmaktadır. Ayrıca, siber terörizm ile DDoS saldırıları arasındaki ilişki sunulmaktadır.

Starting to Write Your Own Linux Shellcode

This facility to use these tools has empowered many and has created a rise in the numbers of people who can research software vulnerabilities. It has created more security professionals who cannot only scan a target for vulnerabilities using a tool such as Nessus, but who can complete tests involving system exploitations and hence validate the results presented to them by a scanner. But, this ends when a new application with unexpected calls or controls is found. What do we do when presented with a special case? Here we have to again return to the old art of crafting shellcode. At some stage, if we are to be more than white hat script kiddies and want to come to actually understand the application we need to learn how to craft our own custom shellcode. In this article, we start to explain the process used to do this.

Hackers' Motivations: Testing Schwartz's Theory of Motivational Types of Values in a Sample of Hackers

IntroductionThe activity of is a contested topic as scientists, practitioners, the general public, and even hackers themselves continuously debate about what hacking exactly is and who can be considered a hacker. The definition of has changed over time, as well as its connotation, which in turn influenced the way hackers are perceived. Levy (2010) has extensively investigated the hacker culture, starting with the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fifties and sixties. Initially, the word was used to describe elaborate college pranks by MIT students that had nothing to do with computers. In the late fifties, the use of this term changed quickly when a few young students became intrigued with the large mainframes at their university. Once they had access to these computers, they worked day and night to explore their possibilities by debugging existing programmes and writing new programmes. By this time, a hack represented an act involving the computer that demonstrated innovation, style, and technical virtuosity (Levy, 2010, p. 10). This pride in was stripped during the eighties when law enforcement, popular press, and private corporations began to criminalise activities and portray hackers as disobedient citizens, or worse: as enemies of the state (Nissenbaum, 2004; Halbert, 1997; Kilger, Stutzman, & Arko, 2004; Taylor, 2005).Indeed, several hackers did cause great damage to companies and individuals, and consequently to society at large (Nissenbaum, 2004; Australian Institute of Criminology, 2005). However, focusing only on hackers with destructive intents hampers the garnering of insight into hackers' minds. This narrow focus also neglects the fact that hackers form a heterogeneous community (Barber, 2001). The tendency to classify hackers as either 'good' or 'bad' appears to decrease in the literature with the emergence of less judgmental categories, such as hacktivists (hacker activists; Conway, 2003; Woo, Kim, & Dominick, 2009) and script kiddies (novice hackers; Nissenbaum, 2004). More elaborate classifications are based on motivation or intent, but still tend to classify hackers as malicious or non-malicious, since such classifications are often aimed at aiding criminal profiling (Rogers, 2006; Meyers, 2009; Smith & Rupp, 2002).The few studies that examined the motivations of hackers most often adopted a phenomenological-interpretive approach by interviewing hackers (Jordan & Taylor, 1998; Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2005; Hutchings, 2013). This approach enables researchers to examine the social and cultural reality from the interviewees' point of view. In other words, hackers are asked to freely express their motivations and the researcher uses their accounts to build a theory (Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2005). While this type of research certainly has its benefits, the pitfall is that the accounts reported by hackers might be more reflective of culturally recognised motivations than their true personal motivations (Campbell & Kennedy, 2009). Personal motivations can be rather implicit and people might therefore not even be aware of them. The present study examines hackers' motivations by employing an empirically based motivational theory, namely Schwartz's (1992) Theory of Motivational Types of Values.As previously stated, the hacker community is not homogeneous and is still inconsistently defined. Therefore, in this paper a definition of is employed that captures the diversity of the community and its activities, yet adheres to elements often associated with hacking. These elements are: (1) innovative use of technology, (2) eagerness to explore systems, and (3) programming (The Hacker's Dictionary, 2001; Taylor, 2005; Caelli, Longley, & Shain (1989) in Warren & Leitch, 2010). The definition found in the literature on that best incorporates these elements is put forward by Alleyne (2011, p. …

The New Computer Hacker’s Quest and Contest with the Experienced Hackers: A Qualitative Study applying Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory

IntroductionThe considerable body of literature seeking to understand computer hackers' motivations and behaviors still needs further inquiry as hacking cyber crime grows in sophistication and geographic reach (Decary-Hetu & Dupont, 2013; Nikitina, 2012; Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2008; Yar, 2005; Taylor, 1999; Jordan & Taylor, 1998). Needing further investigation is the area of new computer hackers or newbies. This study specifically examines newbie hackers' acquisitions of skills and knowledge in their interactions with experienced hackers in a public hacker forum. The framework this study uses is Field Theory by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu, 1985; Bourdieu, 1977) with an emphasis on hackers' skills and knowledge trading, the cultural and social capital of the field (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu, 1984), between newbies and experienced hackers.Although social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are used by hackers, online community forums are still utilized as spaces hackers gather online (Kubitschko, 2015). Newbies join to gain access to highly specialized skills, information-sharing, networking and support from experienced hackers (Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2008; Meyer & Thomas, 1990) but may experience admonishment, mocking and insults for their lack of skills and types of questions they ask (Decary-Hetu & Dupont, 2013; Meyer & Thomas, 1990). Hence the field of the forum operates on power relations; that is, in Bourdieu's terms (1990), the capital of skills and knowledge is contested by newbies because they want what the experienced hacker possesses. This exploratory study focuses specifically on this aspect. Research on newbies has not adequately focused on describing and analyzing the relationships between newbies and experienced hackers in online community hacker forums.The investigation of hacker forums to discover their characteristics and activities for cyber security has previously occurred. For example, Imperva, a global computer network security company, conducted a qualitative content analysis of threads within a large hacker forum. Their report identified descriptive trends, such as increased Structured Query Language (SQL) injections discussions to cause Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to a noted increase in newbies joining the forums from previous years' analyses (Imperva, 2012). Although using a considerably larger sample size than this study, 250,000 members' threads were examined (Imperva, 2012), it is clear that hacker forums require further analysis to give computer network security professionals insights into hacker behaviors and identify trends in hacker culture.Newbie hackers desire to be a part of a hacking community even if their individual goals differ. Hackers' desire, as Nissenbaum (2004) describes, total and free access to computers and information, and mistrust centralized authority, have a disdain for obstacles erected against free access to computing and desire to be evaluated by their technical virtuosity and accomplishment. Hackers hack for reasons such as: conflicts with authorities and revenge motives (Chiesa, Ducci & Ciappi, 2009), beliefs that breaking into computer systems benefit society by showing how to increase computer security (Kao, Huang & Wang, 2009), achieving feelings of power due to low self-esteem (Fotinger & Ziegler, 2004), gaining entrance to a social group (Kilger, Stutzman & Arkin, 2004) and to satisfy an addition (Taylor, 1999). These also play a part in a desire newbies have to join a hacker community and work with experienced hackers to learn skills and knowledge to hack computer systems.Yet newbie hackers face a constant battle to be accepted by hackers from the beginning of their quests to obtain the capital they need to hack. For example, experienced hackers resent script kiddies and unskilled hackers who use hacking tools such as code and scripts developed by experienced hackers. In a display of power by experienced hackers, script kiddies are identified, shamed and called pestilence and other terms, and banned from hacker communities (Taylor, Fritsch, Liederback & Holt, 2011). …

Cyberethics: Identifying The Moral, Legal And Social Issues Of Cybertechnology In K-12 Classrooms

Two computer viruses that have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage over the past four years are the Melissa and the Sasser virus. In March of 1999, the Melissa virus first appeared on the Internet and spread rapidly throughout computer systems in the United States and Europe. The virus made its way through 1.2 million computers in the United States alone. On December 9, 1999, David Smith pleaded guilty to state and federal charges associated with his creation of the Melissa virus (Vamosi, 2003). Reasons for writing the viruses; boredom, the challenge, and thats what Im good at, what I like to do. In May, 2004, the Sasser virus was released by an 18 year old in Germany (Williams, 2004). The arrest made on this script kiddie was the first which used Microsofts $5,000,000 fund, even though millions has been offered for information on other viruses. Unfortunately, young virus creators are unwilling to turn one another in, claiming they write viruses because they have nothing else to do or because they just want to see what happens. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, this paper will describe the extent of Internet/cyber use by American students. Second, this paper will present data from a resent research project showing the large amount of cyber crimes are secondary students are aware of and are participating in. Finally, this paper will present scenarios which might help the reader understand why ethical choices of todays script kiddies are not as black and white as the reader might think.

The IT security game

IT security is no game, and those who practice it can expect no respite from the onslaught of online threats except for this game. You have to steer your organisation past the hackers, script kiddies and disgruntled employees. Your future as CIO is at stake, and your decisions could spell the difference between winning or losing. All you need are a couple of standard games dice, and some form of place marker for each player e.g., a tiddly-wink. Start the game with three products or services you can buy that you think should enhance your security. As you move around the board, you find out whether or not they work. One piece of bad planning can send you back to the beginning. When you land on a Random Event, and you haven't implemented the necessary protection, you take the full impact. If you have, you get to laugh in the face of chance and roll again. Serpents of unforseen fate lurk elsewhere: green slithers you up, while red slithers you down.

Visceral Hacking or Packet Wanking? The Ethics of Digital Code

Although hacking is painted as destructive and anti-social in the eyes of the mainstream media, many hackers seek to reclaim it and its meaning as a harmless if not socially beneficial activity. One strategy is to construct a boundary between legitimate hacking and the activities of the much maligned script kiddies, inspired by a 'hacker ethic.' This hacker ethic springs directly from hacker practice, and thus emerges from the visceral register, particularly that associated with pleasure. It is also engaged in a politics of becoming which attempts to extend ethical principles of equality and freedom to information environments and applications. This paper argues that the presence of the 'other' of hacking continues to contaminate hacking because of the ambiguous and contradictory nature of this ethic. It argues that the ambiguities inherent in the visceral source of hacking's ethical orientation will continue to destabilize its legitimacy. Further, hacking cannot justify itself based on appeals to the virtues of hacking skill without contradicting its own moorings in the politics of becoming. To illustrate this argument, the paper looks at a case study of script kiddies and their involvement in distributed denial of service attacks against seven corporate websites in February 2000.

Gang culture in the online world

It was only a matter of time before hackers pooled their skills and resources to form organised cyber gangs better equipped to spread malware and spam. Clandestine collectives from blackhat strongholds in Eastern Europe, the US and China are emerging. Their tactics may vary but their designs are always the same: to siphon money from consumers and businesses alike by fraud, theft or extortion. Simon Heron of Network Box explores the impetus for these collaborations; the gangs’ character traits and their tools of the trade, how they recruit members, and how the turf wars rage unseen inside PCs. The era when script kiddies were the primary online threat has long since passed. Today, hacking and malicious code are big business. Too big, it would seem, for some black hats to manage single-handed.

Working the botnet: how dynamic DNS is revitalising the zombie army

Botnet operators are the Svengalis of the PC world, enslaving desktop PCs and then making them do their bidding. Thanks to worms and Trojan horses, a grandmother in Arizona could end up hosting illegal content on an FTP site without ever realising it. But what happens when she turns her PC off, or her ISP allocates another IP address? Thanks to dynamic DNS services, botnet operators can hop around to different addresses and create new bot controllers or malicious content hosters at will. It makes it even more difficult for law enforcers and security professionals to deal with a phenomenon that was already challenging enough. Is there any way to deal with the problem? Years ago hackers were little more than script kiddies who busied themselves in their bedrooms writing malicious code. They caused disruption for kicks, and their reward was kudos from the hacking community.

Privacy-Enabled Global Threat Monitoring

The history of intrusion detection research gives a nice example of a community in a perpetual race to stay relevant. While we once focused on detecting user account misuse in mainframes, we then moved on to local area network abuse, and then to address the scalability problems in enterprise-wide detection. With the rise of e-commerce in the late 1990s, we intrusion detection developers have had to react to the emergence of script kiddies and Web defacements. Distributed denial-of-service attacks and wide-scale virus propagation soon followed, as did a new term, malware research, to address the growing concern about viruses and self-replicating worms spreading across the Internet at alarming speeds. More recently, we've had to consider the problem of botnets, which can organize and maintain illicit control of thousands of machines for months at a time to spread spam, conduct phishing attacks, or steal data or computing resources. Over the past decade, intrusion detection research has rarely been boring

Visceral Hacking or Packet Wanking? The Ethics of Digital Code

Although hacking is painted as destructive and anti‐social in the eyes of the mainstream media, many hackers seek to reclaim it and its meaning as a harmless if not socially beneficial activity. One strategy is to construct a boundary between legitimate hacking and the activities of the much maligned script kiddies, inspired by a ‘hacker ethic’. This hacker ethic springs directly from hacker practice and thus emerges from the visceral register, particularly that associated with pleasure. It is also engaged in a politics of becoming which attempts to extend ethical principles of equality and freedom to information environments and applications. This paper argues that the presence of the ‘other’ of hacking continues to contaminate hacking because of the ambiguous and contradictory nature of this ethic. It argues that the ambiguities inherent in the visceral source of hacking’s ethical orientation will continue to destabilise its legitimacy. Further, hacking cannot justify itself based on appeals to the virtues of hacking skill without contradicting its own moorings in the politics of becoming. To illustrate this argument, the paper looks at a case study of script kiddies and their involvement in distributed denial of service attacks against seven corporate websites in February 2000.

The shellcode generation

We can build an entire taxonomy of attacks on network security by understanding exploitation programs, which take advantage of bugs in software running on vulnerable systems, these programs' technical capabilities and their connection to those who develop and use them. For the past decade, exploit tools have signaled the evolution of a community of adversaries comprising numerous inexperienced and unskilled attackers commonly referred to as script kiddies, and a few experienced, technically savvy attackers. Exploit programs are tell-tale signs of attackers' sophistication: if studied meticulously, they can provide insight into current and future trends.

Clustering As An Add-on For Firewalls

The necessary spread of the access points to network services makes them vulnerable to many potential and different types of attackers: script kiddies, hackers, and misfeasors. Although the network services produce a great quantity of data logged by hosts, it is impossible for a security officer, and generally for a network administrator, to monitor daily generated traffic in order to control attacks. Currently a LAN is defended with a mixture of solutions adopted at different levels. Commercial firewalls typically use descriptive statistics to give the security officer information about the quantitative characteristics of the TCP/IP traffic as a whole. In this work, we generate information on the “profile” of connections by means of clustering techniques. This approach makes the security officer able to detect connections that are far away from the mass. We use different clustering techniques in order to study their response for this type of problem. Results on real traffic data are reported and commented.

Blaster variant writers busted

Authorities have closed in on two script kiddies for releasing variants of MS Blaster. This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security industry news

Federated Identities Create New Security Risks

The latest threat to corporate networks is not some gang of script kiddies based in a far-off land, sharpening up their coding skills and exploiting your unsuspecting Windows server security loopholes. The trouble lies within, and this new threat has to do with the loosely coupled Web identities called federation that is being bandied about.

MS’s Culp wants to hush up bugs

It was only a matter of time before hackers pooled their skills and resources to form organised cyber gangs better equipped to spread malware and spam. Clandestine collectives from blackhat strongholds in Eastern Europe, the US and China are emerging. Their tactics may vary but their designs are always the same: to siphon money from consumers and businesses alike by fraud, theft or extortion.Simon Heron of Network Box explores the impetus for these collaborations; the gangs’ character traits and their tools of the trade, how they recruit members, and how the turf wars rage unseen inside PCs.The era when script kiddies were the primary online threat has long since passed. Today, hacking and malicious code are big business. Too big, it would seem, for some black hats to manage single-handed.