The Art of Intrusion does hit on one interesting insight. The received view of hackers is that they are individuals deeply immersed in computing, fluent in at least one computer language, and possessed of an array of sometimes arcane knowledge. For the most part, this image is correct. But one of the most interesting hackers in the book turns out to be a guy called Adrian Lamo. He has no programming skills, admits to having a poor short-term memory, and yet through huge intelligence overcomes his lack of inside knowledge. A classic autodidact, he appears to come at computer systems with no pre-conceptions about what is, and is not, possible.
“His success instead relies on analysing how people think, how they set up systems, the processes that are used by the system and network administrators to do network architecture.”
He was able, it turns out, to wander the network of the apparently impregnable New York Times, using nothing more than his intuition about human frailties and, indeed, the technical mind, to get at all sorts of the newspaper’s most important secrets. A conventional techie hacker might very well have failed to do what Adrian did; his hack depended on an intuitive understanding of how systems are created (and often inadvertently left insecure) by people and the organisations they work for.
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