Linux Format censored over 'Learn to Hack' feature
Future's Linux Format magazine has been pulled from the shelves of Barnes & Noble over a controversial 'Learn to Hack' feature.
Issue 154 of Linux Format magazine had as its cover feature a piece entitled 'Learn to Hack,' walking readers through the use of the Metasploit Framework exploitation toolkit to gain access to computer systems running a variety of operating systems. The article also covered password cracking, network sniffing, and man-in-the-middle attacks over encrypted protocols.
More importantly, the guide also covered how best to protect your systems from the self-same attacks, providing readers with information that the publication hoped would help keep them safe from the ne'er-do-wells inhabiting the seedier sides of the net.
Despite a warning of the illegalities of using any of the information contained within the article to attack systems which you do not own, the cracking tutorial proved too much for Barnes & Noble. The US bookseller pulled all copies of the magazine from shelves, although it's not yet clear whether it did so at the request of its own management or as a response to complaints from an outside agency.
In a response to Barnes & Noble's apparent censorship, Future has elected to put the content of the article online for free, for those who were unable to read it in the magazine. Quoting security guru Bruce Schneier - 'I believe that the subject is just too critical, too integral a part of our everyday lives, to be left exclusively in the hands of experts' - the magazine's editors have defended the feature while apologising for those who missed out on the magazine.
The publication has also elected to continue with the planned publication of an pro-privacy tutorial in the latest issue entitled 'Beat the CIA,' in response to government plans in both the UK and US to introduce increasingly intrusive communications monitoring and censorship laws.
Thus far, Barnes & Noble has not indicated whether it will be carrying the latest issue.
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16 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replyme too. might get it in town today
What next? Censoring file trackers?
Oh.
Linux format sales increase due to publicty
I don't think the government is as worried about being hacked as say a large profitable company like Sony. Anyways, I think it would be funny and ironic if the result of putting the "content of the article online for free" would result in POed customers using that hacking knowledge to hack B&N.
Also, wouldn't it have been easier if B&N just asked if they could cut out the pages explaining how to hack? I'm sure that entire magazine doesn't consist of just hacking.
CIA = Central of IDIOCY Agency
Shhhhhh
Listen carefully...
I was actually going to do the same thing over a year back.. wrote a batch of tools that does much of what you need to do automatically- was a lot of work.. everyone I talked to said I would end up in court so dropped the idea of selling it along with a hardware package that could blow away anything you can buy.. I'm talking breaking into any wifi from quite a distance, along with a service to break the wpa/wpa2 handshakes.. you could do it even indoors using my home made directional 17db yagi antennas (milled down to a thousands of an inch- computer modeled) paired with the right hardware to get it there, then using metasploit / man in the middle attacks (actually called it micheal jacksons touch lol stayed up weeks coding all the parts in python)
before my pops passed he told me he was proud of that decision, my sister told me the moral implications but I was so caught up in the money end of it wasn't seeing strait.. no amount of money can rub away having people hurt financially because their bank account/paypal/cc was hacked by an idiot using my tools (I mean the main clients would be criminals- they would be very interested in this sort of thing).. it's not that it's really hard- because the ideas are already there, but making it easy for the semi coherent long stretches is something that should be avoided..
see criminals are well dumb- that's why they are criminals.. they can't hack it in the real world so they do things the easy way (fleece johnson).. if you leave in the monkey wrench- most will just give up and move onto something they can understand.. think most in the security field would agree with me on this- we don't need step by step instructions on how to break into rigs