==Phrack Inc.==
|=-----------------------=[ Phrack Pro-Phile of ]=------------------
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|=-------------------=[ The Circle of Lost Hackers ]=---------------
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Welcome to Phrack Pro-Phile. Phrack Pro-Phile is created to bring
info to you, the users, about old and highly important controversial
peoples. The first Phrack Pro-Phile was created in Phrack Issue 4 by
Taran King. Since this date, a total of 43 profile were realized.
Some
well know hackers were profiled like Taran King, The Mentor,
Knigh Lighting, Lex Luthor, Emmanuel Goldstein, Erik Bloodaxe,
Control-C, Mudge, Aleph-One, Route, Voyager, Horizon or more
recently Scut.
This prophile is probably a little more different since it will
introduce
the new staff. Since the people composing The Circle of Lost Hackers
want to stay anonymous, the Prophile will be more a "question-
answer"
prophile.
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Personal
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Handle: The Circle of Lost Hackers
Call them: call them want to you want, just be careful
Handle Origin: Dead Poets Society movie
Date of Birth: from 1977 to 1984
Age at current date: haha
Countries of origin: America, South-America and Europe
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Favorite Things
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Women : Angelina Jolie because she was a great hacker in a movie
Cars : Like everyone, the Dolorean. The only nice car in the
world.
Foods : Italian food is without a doubt the best food. Some other
prefer Chinese or Japanese once they tasted Yakitori's.
Alcohols : anything which make you drunk
Drugs : sex
Music : Drum and Bass, Sublime, Orbital, Red Hot Chili Peppers,
DJ Shadow,
The Chemical Brothers, The Mars Volta, more generally
death metal,
and gothic rock. Abstract electro bands like Boards of Canada.
Movies : Blade Runner, The Usual Suspect, Fight Club, Kill Bill,
hackers (private joke)
Authors : Gurdjieff, Rufolf Steiner, Rupert Sheldrake, Plato,
Stephan
Hawkings, Roger Penrose, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky,
Sun Tzu, Nicolas Tesla, Douglas Hofstadter, Ernesto
Guevara,
Daniel Pennac, Gabriele Romagnoli
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Open Interview
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Q: Hello
A: Saluto amigo!
Q: Can you introduce yourselves in a few words?
A: The Circle of Lost Hackers is a group of friends overall. Two
years
ago when TESO decided to stop Phrack, the voice of the
underground
decided not to let Phrack dying. People started to wonder ..
Phrack is
really dead ? In no way it is. Phrack reborns, always, from the
influence
of multiple hacking crews to make this possible. But at the
beginning it was not easy to
create a new team, a lot of people agreed to continue Phrack but
not
really to write or review articles. Also, one of the most
important
thing was to have people with the good spirit. Now we think that
we have a good team and we hope bring to the Underground scene a
lot
of quality papers like in old issues of Phrack, but keeping the
technical
touch that makes Phrack a unique hacking magazine. The Phrack
staff evolves
and will always evoluate a new talents get interested in sharing
for fun
and free information.
Q: How many people are composing The Circle of Lost Hackers?
A: We could tell you, but we would have to kill you, after. The only
important thing is that "The Circle of Lost Hackers" is not a
restricted club. More people will join us, others may leave,
depending
on who really believes in comunication, hacking and freedom of
research
and information.
Q: When did you start to play with computers and to learn hacking?
A: Each one of us could answer differently. There's not a "perfect"
age to
start, neither it is ever too late to start. Hacking is
researching. It
is being so obstinated on resolving and understanding things to
spend
nights over a code, a vulnerability, an electronic device, an
idea.
Hacking is something you have inside, maybe you'll never take a
computer or write a code, but if you've an "hacking mind" it will
reveal itself, sooner or later.
To give you an idea of the first computers of some members of the
team, it was a 286, 486 SX or an Amiga 1000. Each of us started
to play with computer at the end of 80' or beginning of 90'. The
hacking life of our team started more or less around 97. Like
with
a lot of people, Phrack and 2600 mag were and are a great source
of
inspiration, as well as IRC and reading source code.
Q: What's the story of your "hacking career" ?
A: [maybe explain that we start with stupid things, after we
discovered phrack
and real hacking techniques, we read a lot, joined a group (or
made a group)
meet new people, start new group, hack a lot, etc. Be original
!]
Q: This interview is quite strange, you do the questions and the
answers at the same time ?!?!
A: What's the problem, in phrack issue 20 Taran King did a prophile
of himself!!!
Q: Can you tell us what is your most memorable experience?
A: Each of us has a lot of memorable experiences but we don't
really have
a common experience where we hacked all together. So to make
easy we are
going to take three of our "memorable" experiences.
1.
A subtle modification about p0f wich made me finding documents
that I wasn't supposed to find. Some years ago, I had a period
when
each month I tried to focus on the security of one country. One
of
those countries was South-Korea where I owned a big ISP. After
spending some time to figure out how I could leave the DMZ and
enter
in the LAN, I succeed thanks to a cisco modification (I like
default passwords). Once in the LAN and after hiding my activity
(userland > kernelland), I installed a slightly modification of
p0f. The purpose if this version was to scan automatically all
the windows box found on the network, mount shared folders and
list all files in these folders. Nothing fantastic. But one of
the computers scanned contained a lot of files about the other
Korea... North Korea. And trust me, there were files that I
wasn't supposed to find. I couldn't believe it. I could do the
evil guy and try to sell these files for money, but I had (and
I still have) a hacker ethic. So I simply added a text file on
the desktop to warn the user of the "flaw". After that I left
the network and I didn't come back. It was more than 5 years
ago so don't ask me the name of the ISP I can't remember.
2.
[sauron can you add one?]
3.
Learning hacking by practice with some of the best hackers world-
wide.
Sometimes you think you know something but its almost always
possible to find
someone who prove you the opposite. Wether we talk about hacking
a very
big network with many thousands of accounts and know exactly how
to handle
this in minuts in the stealthiest manner, or about auditing
source code
and find vulnerability in a daemon server or Operating System
used by
millions of peoples on the planet, there is always someone to
find that
outsmart you, when you thought being one of the best in what you
are doing.
I do not want to enter in detail to avoid compromising anyone's
integrity,
but the best experience are those made of small groups (3, 4 ..)
of hackers,
working on something in common (hacking, exploits, coding,
audits ..), for
example in a screen session. Learning by seing the others do.
Teaching
younger hackers. Sharing knowledge in a very restricted personal
area.
Partying in private with hackers from all around the world and
getting 0day
found, coded, and used in a single hacking session.
Q: Is one of you has been busted in a previous life?
A: Hope no but who knows?
Q: What do you think about the current scene?
A: We think a lot of things, probably the best answer is to read the
article "A brief history of the Underground" in this issue where
we are talking about the scene and the Underground.
Q: What's your opinion about old phracks?
A: Great. Old phracks were the first source of information when we
were
starving for more to learn. _The_ point of reference. But don't
stop
yourselves to the last 10 issues, all issues are still
interesting.
Q: And about PHC?
A: Well, thats an interesting question. To be honest, PHC did not
just do
those bad things we were used to learn from the web or irc, we
like some
of them and even know very well a few others. Also, the two
attempted
issues 62 and 63 of PHC had an incontestable renew in the spirit
and t
here were even some useful information on honeypots and
protecting exploits.
However, we have a problem with unjustified arrogance. If it's
true the
security world has a problem with white/black hats, we think
that the good
way to resolve the problem is not to fight everyone, especially
such a poor
demonstrative way. It's not our conception of hacking. Take the
first 20 issues
of Phrack and try to find unjustified arrogant
word/sentence/paragraph: you won't
find any. The essence of hacking is different : it's learning.
Hacking to learn.
You can be a blackhat and working in the IT industry, it's
not incompatible. We have nothing against PHC and we think the
Underground needs a group like PHC. But the Underground needs a
magazine
like Phrack as well. The main battle of PHC is fighting
whitehats but
it's not Phrack's battle. It's never been the purpose of Phrack.
If we have to fight against something, it's against the society
and
not targeting whitehats personally (that doesn't mean that we
support
whitehat...). Phrack is about fighting the society by releasing
information
about technologies that we are not supposed to learn. And these
technologies
are not only Unix-related and/or software vulnerabilities.
We agree with them when they say that recent issues of Phrack
helped
probably too much the security industry and that there was a
lack of
spirit. We're doing our best to change it. But we still need
technical
articles. If they want to change something in the Underground,
they are
welcome to contribute to Phrack. Like everyone in the
Underground
community.
Q: Full-disclosure or non-disclosure?
A: Semi-disclosure. For us, obviously. Free exchange of techniques,
ideas
and codes, but not ready-to-use exploit, neither ready-to-patch
vulnerabilities.
Keep your bugs for yourself and for your friend, do the best to
not
make them leak. If you're cool enough, you'll find many and
you'll be
able to patch your boxes.
Disclosing techniques, ideas and codes implementations helps the
other
Hackers in their work, disclosing bugs or releasing "0-day"
exploits
helps only the Security Industry and the script kiddies.
And we don't want that.
You might be an Admin, you might be thinking : "oh, but my box
is not
safe if i don't know about vulnerabilities". That's true, but
remember
that if only very skilled hackers have a bug you won't have to
face a
"rm -rf" of the box or a web defacement. That's kiddies game, not
Hackers one.
But that's our opinion. You might have a totally different one
and we
will respect it. You might even want to release a totally
unknown bug
on Phrack's pages and, if you write a good article, we'll help
you in
publishing it. Maybe discussing the idea, before.
As we said in the introduction, the first thing we want to
garantee
is freedom of speech. That's the identity of our journal.
Q: What's the best advice that you can give to new generation of
hackers?
A: First of all, enjoy hacking. Don't do that for fame or to earn
more
money, neither to impress girl (hint: not always works ;)) or
only to
be published somewhere. Hack for yourself, hack for your
interest, hack
to learn.
Second, be careful. In every thing you do, in any relationship
you'll
have. Respect people and try to not distrupt their work only
because
you're distracted or angry.
Third, have fun. Have a lot of fun.
And never, never, never setup an honeypot (hi Lance!).
Q: What do you think about starting an Underground World Revolution
Movement against the establishment ?
A: Do it. But do it Underground. The nowadays world is too obsessed
by
"visibility". Act, let the others talk.
Q: What's the future of hacking ?
A: The future is similar to the present and to the past. "Hacking"
is the
resulting mix of curiosity and research for information, fun and
freedom. Things change, security evolves and so does technology,
but the
"hacker-mind" is always the same. There will always be hackers,
that is
skilled people who wants to understand how things really go.
To be more concrete, we think that the near future will see way
more
interest in hardware and embedded systems hacking : hardware chip
modification to circumvent hardware based restrictions, mobile
and
mobile services exploits/attacks, etc.
Moreover, seems like more people is hacking for money (or, at
least,
that's more "publicly" known), selling exploits or backdoors.
Money is
usually the source of many evils. It is indeed a good motivating
factor
(moreover hacking requires time and having that time payed when
you
don't have any other work is really helpful), but money brings
with
itself the business mind. People who pays hackers aren't
interested in
research, they are interested in business. They don't want to
pay for
months of research that lead to a complex and eleet tecnique,
they want
a simple php bug to break into other companies website and
change the
homepage. They want visible impact, not evolved culture.
We're not for the "hacking-business" idea, you probably realized
that.
We're not for exploit disclosure too, unless the bug is already
known
since time and showing the exploit code would let better
understand the
coding techniques involved. And we don't want that someone with
a lot of
money (read : governement and big companies) will be one day
able to
"pay" (and thus "buy") all the hackers around.
But we're sure that that will never happen, thanks to the
underground,
thanks to people like you who read phrack, learn, create and hack
independently.
Q: Do you have some people or groups to mention ?
A: (mentioning some people and say what do u thing about them, phc,
etc)
There are groups and people who have made (or are making) the
effective
evolving of the scene. We try to tell a bit of their story in
"International Scenes" phile (starting from that issue with :
Australia,
New-Zealand, Brazil and France). Each country has its story,
Italy has s0ftpj
and antifork, Germany has TESO, THC and Phenolit (thanks for
your great
ph-neutral party), Russia, France, Netherlands, or Belgium have
ADM,
Synnergy, or Devhell, USA and other countries have PHC...
Each one will have his space on "International Scenes". If
you're part
of it, if you want to tell the "real story", just submit us a
text. If
you are too paranoid to submit a tfile to Phrack, its ok. If you
wish
to participate to the underground information, how journal is
your
journal as well and we can find a solution that keep you
anonymous.
Q: Thank you for this interview, I hope readers will enjoy it!
A; No problem, you're welcome. Can I have a beer now?
--EOF--
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