Jeff Moss, also known as The Dark Tangent, is a well-known figure in the security community, as the founder of Defcon and Black Hat security conferences. Moss is also a hacker, a moniker that everyone doesn’t understand well.
In a keynote session at the SecTor security conference on November 3, Moss detailed the evolution of the hacking movement from the 1970s through to the modern era. He started his talk by declaring that people fear what they do not understand and historically people do not understand hacking.
“They don’t understand complex computer systems and information security and because of that, it’s kind of a voodoo, and if they can’t easily understand, it’s like magic,” Moss said: “So a lot of the problems we’ve had is communicating with people what it is we do and how we do it.”
Defining Hacking
Part of the fear of the term ‘hacker’ is also because the word is not well defined either.
Moss defined hacking as a combination of curiosity and skills. It’s about having an innate curiosity, seeking knowledge and getting pleasure out of novel results. He added that individuals could use hacking skills for both good and evil.
There is also a difference between information security, commonly referred to as infosec and hacking. In Moss’ view, one of the big problems is that people treat all infosec as hacking and all hacking as infosec.
“Hacking can provide a lot of joy and absolutely no income,” Moss said: “With InfoSec, the goal is to produce income. It’s a job; you have to do the thing, solve the problem, write the report.”
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