Hackers Live by Own Code

A fax from a hacker in the Middle East landed on her desk at Oracle Corp., proclaiming the discovery of a hole in the company's database software through which he could steal crucial information from such customers as Boeing Co., Ford Motor Co. and the CIA. The fax warned Davidson, the company's chief security officer, to contact the hacker immediately -- or else.

Luckily, the hacker hadn't found a real hole; he'd just misinterpreted a function of the program. More surprisingly, he meant no harm.

"The sort of threatening tone he took was really only to get our attention," Davidson said. "He actually turned out to be a nice guy."

The confrontational style of Davidson's hacker isn't unusual. As they troll through other people's computer networks, hackers abide by their own quirky rules of etiquette. What would strike most folks in corporate America as bad manners or worse may be considered the height of courtesy in hackerdom.

In large part, that disconnect stems from the fierce individualism of hackers -- they are, after all, the sort of people who set aside the instruction manual and take a machine apart to see how it works. Though they inhabit a lawless domain where no data are considered private and "No Trespassing" signs are meaningless, they adhere to their own codes of ethics that vary depending largely on what motivates the hacker to hack.

Sometimes it's fame. Now and then it's money. Often it's a selfless desire to make software more secure. And occasionally it's a yearning to wreak senseless havoc.

The frequency of such attacks is on the rise, capped by the Blaster worm and SoBig virus that overpowered e-mail programs and crashed computer systems this summer. Computer Economics Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif., estimates that damage caused by hackers will cost companies and consumers $12.5 billion this year, up 13% from 2002.

Most hackers aren't malicious, security experts agree. But from afar, it can be difficult to distinguish the saboteurs from the merely curious, because they use the same tools, travel in the same virtual circles and often share a disdain for the rule of law.

Their philosophy predates personal computers, going back to the days when pranksters manipulated the telephone system to make free long-distance calls and cause other mischief. The personal rules that guide them today generally allow them to break laws, as long as they believe nobody will get hurt.