I was just reading an article that was talking about Mafiaboy and what he is doing now, 8 years after knocking Yahoo offline. It struck me that “hackers” have changed from tinkerers to mafia types.
Once upon a time Timmy, hackers were people that just wanted to see what would happen if they touched that button or changed this byte. Now they are going around mugging tourists and they don’t care how they do it. There is so little curiousity left in the next generation of hackers that when the previous generation dies off from vitamin D deficiency all the tools will be lost also. Or at least new iterations of them.
All of the new attacks and new vulnerabilities seem to be coming from the previous generation. How do you teach innovation? How do you teach curiousity? I don’t think you can.
