(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best computer hacking books

Kick ass man. It's possible that I know you. I used to call a bunch of those all over the world.

I will say the pure joy of figuring out that I could still blue box in the early 1990s (and for almost another 10+ years after that) was fantastic. I used programs on my Amiga 500 to do it. The switches were already replaced with OOB-signalling locally and in the US, but other countries still used the older in-band stuff. It was awesome calling BBS's all over the world. While I was on the internet at that point, the phone system was still a massive infrastructure that was so fun to play with.

Highly recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Phil-Lapsley/dp/0802122280/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522161530&sr=8-1&keywords=exploding+the+phone

This is a common misconception of the groups entirety. Anonymous was not made for the sole purpose of hacking. It was made for fighting against the corrupt and doing the right thinking, helping people when they couldn't help themselves. They are believers in freedom of speech as well as freedom of information. To you point of "joining anonymous", there is not application for join anonymous it is more of an ideology it is something that will never go away as long a people remain associated with it. I can go on and on but if you would like to learn more about anonymous I would recommend reading Gabriella Coleman book (Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous). You can find it here https://www.amazon.com/Hacker-Hoaxer-Whistleblower-Spy-Faces/dp/1781689830

As far as hacking goes you can read up on some books, enroll in some classes, or reach out to people (harder than it sounds). Knowledge is power, if you want something you have to be committed.

ok, so the question is why are you posting in bad faith?

edit

reposting to speed you up:

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-access-hollywood-tape-733037/

Two years have passed, and Trump is president because the events of October 7th, 2016 marked a revolution. This was the moment that the old gatekeepers were swept aside, their indignation and appeals to “decency” kicked to the curb with them. Instead, the 2016 election would be decided by competing viral events, what we call “LikeWars.” This was the moment that the Internet swallowed politics for good.

Beyond the Access Hollywood tape, two other events transpired online that day. The first was official acknowledgement by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had targeted the 2016 election by hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton proxies — a story of momentous importance that would be immediately lost in the “locker room talk” news cycle. The second, coming just minutes after the Washington Post published its article with the Access Hollywood video embedded, was the fruits of the the aforementioned hack. This was the initial release of the “Podesta Emails,” laundered through the “transparency” organization Wikileaks. The document dump would be repeated dozens of times, amounting to more than 20,000 pages of stolen communications.

This was the ammunition that Trump depended on to mount his comeback.

On the night of October 7th, the soldiers of r/the_donald were beset by the same tension that swept political observers across the country. For hours, the subreddit’s notoriously tight-fisted moderators deleted all mention of the Access Hollywood tape. Then came Trump’s midnight half-apology video. Seconds later, r/the_donald erupted with new resolve. It was time to fight — to overwhelm the “MSM” (mainstream media) with a level of sound and fury they couldn’t match. “I don’t think anyone is prepared for the scorched earth that’s about to happen,” user ‘PlasticGio’ wrote, capturing the mood.

What followed was an online information campaign that essentially conquered the Internet. The Access Hollywood tape dominated headlines for roughly a week; “Wikileaks,” on the other hand, was an unrelenting drumbeat of rumors and wild allegations that left conservatives in a perpetual state of fury. It didn’t matter that most of the stories were fake (Podesta did not drink bodily fluids in secret cult dinners, nor was Pizzagate real). What mattered was that these conspiracies continued to pick up steam through election day.

Trump’s savvy digital army helped ensure that Wikileaks stayed in the news while Access Hollywood gradually fell out of it. Most of these supporters had grown up on the Internet. They understood how to hijack conversations and — crucially — how to amplify their voices until no others could be heard. They helped manage a horde of 200,000 pro-Trump Twitter bots (roughly a quarter of which were built by Russians), ensuring that their messages trended and reached beyond Trump supporters to a wider audience. A single pro-Trump software developer, “MicroChip,” described to BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein how he popped Adderall as he pounded through 12-hour shifts. With his bot machine firing on all cylinders, he could elicit 30,000 retweets in a single day.

On Twitter, the bane and obsession of the U.S. political class, the effect was to mask any decline in Trump’s popularity while driving Clinton’s numbers steadily lower. A comprehensive study of the sentiment of 300 million Trump- and Clinton-related tweets across the 2016 campaign found that the majority of Clinton’s were negative — a trend that accelerated in the final three months of the election. By contrast, Trump’s trend was almost unrelentingly positive. To examine the sum total of Trump-related Twitter conversation (real and fake) in the weeks following October 7th, the Access Hollywood tape appears but a small dip in an otherwise steady upward climb.

A review of Google Trends data in the final month of the 2016 election shows that “Wikileaks” remained a near-obsessive search term. Interest crested repeatedly with the release of each new tranche of the hacked Podesta emails, driving media coverage accordingly. By contrast, interest in terms related to the hot mic tape — “Access Hollywood,” “Trump Tape” and even “Grab” — spiked on October 7th before all but disappearing after just five days. Search interest in Trump himself held steady at roughly twice that of Clinton.

Yet the pivotal battlefield was Facebook. In a graph of October 2016 Facebook conversations, since scrubbed from Facebook’s website but reproduced below, “Wikileaks” utterly dominated the platform. Discussion of the hacked emails — and wild, salacious stories they inspired — was bigger than chatter about The Walking Dead or Saturday Night Live. It was even bigger than the Chicago Cubs’ historic Game 7 World Series victory. The only topic more discussed on Facebook was Halloween, mostly in relation to kids and costumes.

The legacy of October 7th echoes through American politics still. It showed that no single event — not blatant misogyny then, not decades of documented tax fraud now — can long dominate the news cycle. What matters now is keeping the beast fed, steering the course of online attention through a steady supply of ammunition to be spun by tireless Internet brigades. This is the way campaigns will operate for the foreseeable future, be they to win an election or fill the Supreme Court. Trump has not forgotten this lesson. It is still unclear if Democrats have learned it.

A default assumption is that every team will contain a warrior so supreme that they got their name from the ability to defeat entire gangs, which usually have more firepower than the local police department, solo.

Runners go out of their way to make themselves as distinctive as possible and never bother to wear masks on runs because the idea of you getting hunted down in a sprawl is a laughable impossibility even if you make it easy on someone. We can't find people in modern cities using modern databases that are arguably set up better than SRs, forget about a sprawl with a population the size of all of California using 12 different databases in a setting where sifting through data is significantly harder than in real life.

My boss is ex-navy (and a shadowrun player, he enjoys riggers, the poor guy) who pointed out that Kane is the most realistic runner of the Jackpointers in that by going to the scale he goes to he can trivially snipe at anyone he wants to with no one ever having any ability to retaliate. Kane could go anywhere he wants to in the world, not just 'hellholes' because the scope of where he could be is impossible to search. You will not find Kane essentially ever. Like I will reiterate that Kane is his favorite because in his real world expert opinion "he is the most realistic" because if your a super criminal a good way to mask your presence is to force your opposition to search the entire god damn ocean for you.

Runners in setting are seen as supremely badass anti-heroes and counter cultural icons. While a given PC may not live up to this, the default assumption for SR was always that if you had talent and wanted to actually stick it to the man, the shadows were a great place to do that.

These are heavily established setting elements that are reiterated pretty constantly and they don't become less true because reality is unrealistic and it feels more real to do the less real thing and pretend that modern society is remotely secure.

A book I recommend to anyone who thinks Pink Mohawk is unrealistic and Black Trenchcoat is realistic is "The future of Violence" which, along with pretty much any experience in any security related field, should dispel that notion right quick. The short version is: as technology improves and cities become more dense and more interconnected, violence and extreme crimes become easier to commit with complete anonymity, not harder, because things like surveillance states don't actually scale well at all and the technology for defeating attacks pretty much always lags behind. SR actually was crazy ahead of the curve back in the day for accidently predicting this when it went out of its way to make "That guy with the rocket launcher shooting at cops" a viable PC pregen that was seen as so basic they made it twice for two different metatypes. If anything, its a wonder the game doesn't point out and run with the ramifications that smartgun platforms and common weapons that come from an entirely black market controlled supply chain completely trivialize anonymous high profile mass shootings and murder. Forget about assassination drones.

Though that of course doesn't service a fun game, which is ultimately the primary concern for any RPG setting, and its a bit bleak and too real to think about.

Furthermore if you don't want to play that way a really simple way to ensure that is to just ask that no one makes a street samurai, who strongly color how a team views violence. Without a samurai (or buff focused mage able to get crazy soaks) teams merely will be 'rather durable' rather than 'gods of war' and combat becomes slow enough its not generally a viable plan A. But, again, remember that one of the CRB story sections literally had plan A be "Drive up right next to the target and have the adept leap out of a car while half naked covered in lightning to punch a ton of spirits out on a crowded street" and this was presented as a fine plan. There are people in setting unarguably capable of pulling stuff that seems a bit much off.

Submission Statement: In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Benjamin Wittes about both volumes of the Mueller Report.

Benjamin Wittes is a legal journalist who focuses on issues of national security and law. He is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law. Benjamin is also the co-founder of Lawfare, a blog devoted to discussion of U.S. national security choices, and a cohost of the Rational Security podcast. His books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting A New Age of Threat (coauthored with Gabriella Blum), Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantánamo,  and Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror.

Thank you :)

I can't put into words what I find meaningful about my game, I find it difficult to express these things. I'm working on it.

The book is https://www.amazon.es/Hacker-Edición-Biblia-Teresa-Jimeno/dp/8441530157

Aside: you might also find some of the equivalent books about the early tech movements interesting; I got into them when I had trouble finding good retro-gaming books several years. Two neat examples would be Exploding The Phone and The Soul Of A New Machine. I never would've guessed that early phreaking or the development of a mainframe could be fascinating, touching and suspenseful, but those books managed to make it seem that way.

Here's a few to try:

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0011GA08E/?coliid=I2AX4MNAR89GW9&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

The Friendly Orange Glow:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101973633/?coliid=IEUJX5OOWTAUK&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

ROLM: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KGID6WU/?coliid=I1AQGJ83D1GS48&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Apple: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00295MJHG/?coliid=I1Q8J5K347MYXY&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Apple: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0986832278/?coliid=I1I3Q5B2K8YST7&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Apple: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393330435/?coliid=I3IE3KZUF3E6WN&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

TRS 80: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004P8JNIS/?coliid=IUCSUMJN8ZWU8&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Compaq: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DTEZ56I/?coliid=I259B8WXOE9LHT&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0WP6/?coliid=I28FZRAZ0WF3CA&colid=1J9YDKJ5WZ8PB&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Secrets of a Super Hacker by Knightmare

If such a day comes to pass, then it will be up to the American people to usurp him from power by any means necessary. In the mean time, here are some reading materials that can help you prepare:

https://www.amazon.com/Mao-Tse-Tung-Guerrilla-Warfare-ebook/dp/B06XGK2VGV/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Mao+Tse-Tung+On+Guerrilla+Warfare&qid=1557026053&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117031.On_War

https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Weapon-Sabotage-Fear-Cyber-ebook/dp/B076Z29HG7/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=david+e+sanger&qid=1557026075&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Armies-History-Guerrilla-Warfare-ebook/dp/B007P9M034/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=invisible+armies&qid=1557026103&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Marine-Corps-Counterinsurgency-Field-Manual-ebook/dp/B002RHOOW4/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=petraeus&qid=1557026162&s=digital-text&sr=1-3

> Teoretic n-am nimic de gen "muta variabila asta in Approaching Zero, o carte pe care nu ar fi bine sa se infiltreze intr-o baza sovietica din Novosibirsk.

Not really "sysadmin fiction"
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H2MRXO/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

I think it based on alot of real stuff.I read the thing in about a day I couldnt put it down (oh that was a good 10-12 years ago)

I've got the The Hackers Underground Handbook as an eBook I could send you if you're interested.

I hope that is sarcasm, if not, here's some bed time reading.

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolutio-Steven-Levy/dp/0385312105

http://www.amazon.com/Lions-Commentary-Unix-John/dp/1573980137/

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0131103628/

Unix is more than a simplified Multric knock off and C is more than some language cobbled together.

Recommended reading for follow-up on the Capt'n Crunch thread: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802122280

The book "LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media" goes DEEP into this subject and came out last October. It's written extremely well and I would highly recommend it if you're looking to learn more about this.

The long and short is 'Memetic Warfare' is EXTREMELY important these days and has changed war as we know it.

It's on amazon too. https://www.amazon.com/Messing-Enemy-Surviving-Terrorists-Russians/dp/0062795988 (note the wording in the link).

> WAHH is still updated with newer editions

I tried again and can't find anything newer than the 2011 2nd edition. Do you have a newer Amazon link, publication year, or something for a newer edition of WAHH?

I did find newer works in the same series (1, 2, 3, 4), but not an update to WAHH.

I assume they mean Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy.

Everyone asking what book it is, I googled a line from it and got:

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous

Amazon link

http://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Anonymous-LulzSec-Insurgency/dp/B00EBFJ5SI

I recommend reading (or listening to) Clint Watt's description of Edward Snowden in his book:

• Messing With The Enemy
  
  
  spoiler: Edward Snowden is not somebody to look up to.
  
  He's now a divisive wedge to spark debate about privacy, information warfare and espionage. It's dangerous to romanticize him, and to forget his role in the Wikileaks/Russia disinformation pipeline.
  
  He is currently in asylum in Moscow, Russia.

This is fascinating. If you're into this stuff I highly suggest reading/listeninng to Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Territory-Secret-History-Cyber/dp/1476763259

There used to be a copy of this in my office. It's every bit as bad as it looks!

You should read Dark Territory.

It goes both ways. Finding exploits means the NSA can use those exploits against foreign actors. Obviously, the existence of those exploits means, those same foreign actors can work against us.

It's a major debate in the intelligence community.

The one side is, pass along the exploits so, they get fixed... makes us safer. The other side is, keep quiet so we can use those exploits against the other side.

Me? I'm on the side of openness. But, I understand the counter argument.

Biella Coleman describes this in her book, so you might want to read that. The interesting thing is that for some operations, the targets, participants, and general public thought the firepower was from a huge number of people each using LOIC or whatever, but the most impact actually came from a small number of Anons using botnets. And the botnet guys were lying to all the other Anons and letting them think everyone was equal in it. So even if someone describes to you how it works, they don't necessarily know.

Also it's changed over time as Anonymous got larger and more diffuse. Originally people would gather in chat rooms and try to reach something of a consensus before acting, but later on, someone would get an idea and just go for it without running it past other people. Which is why those later ops tended to be less effective, because they had fewer people and more half-baked ideas.

Now it's mostly dead.

I agree with /u/TaviRider, I did want to expand on how passwords are attacked and the side channel aspect though.

Regarding the side channel attack, it might be worse than that depending on how they implement it. I could try a user name with any random password that I know won't work. If they compare algorithms and return a failed result instantly if it doesn't match, then I know the algorithm is the opposite of whichever one was involved in my trial. If it's slower to return, then I know a comparison took place. In other words, I don't need to see the encrypted traffic generated by the user, I can generate my own.

Regarding the password cracking.... basically the entire thing is wrong. "Lookup tables"? I mean, I guess you could create something like that, but nobody would. Nobody even uses rainbow tables anymore (think of it as a compressed lookup table, a time/memory tradeoff). There's just no point. If it's a strong/salted hash, then the lookup table won't work. If it's a weak hash, then you can exhaustively search that same keyspace in about the same amount of time. To put it more succinctly, "Rainbow tables are dead. They died years ago. Stop trying to resurrect them." I'm not even sure why this was brought up in the article.

Regarding brute force, same thing, this just isn't really how password cracking is done (shout out to Hash Crack! It's amazing). You use wordlists, rules, and other utilities to generate candidates that you think people are going to actually use, you don't exhaustively search the entire keyspace hoping to get lucky. The only thing this split hashing algorithm has done for me is made my job easier. Now I can divide up the passwords and be much lazier about the 14+ character ones, by that I mean I can throw larger wordlists with more rules at it and get lucky, because hey! fast hashes! Instead of having to get smart about the candidates I generate because bcrypte is so f-ing slow.

TL;DR - No, I don't think this is a good idea. The gold standard of password storage, as far as I've seen, is what Dropbox does - https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/09/how-dropbox-securely-stores-your-passwords/

Autogenerated.

I’ve written a book about how posting is warfare and memes are its weapons. There are terrorists, trolls, IDF officers, and Donald J. Trump, fighting for your attention one viral event at a time. AMA.

Hey Reddit! My name’s Emerson Brooking. I’m a Washington, DC-based defense analyst and coauthor of a new book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, that traces how the modern internet has intersected with war—and birthed new kinds of conflict along the way.

The book chronicles the history of communication and creation of the internet, the development of open-source military intelligence (OSINT), the disinformation tactics of Egypt, Turkey, China, and (especially) Russia, human psychology and the attention economy, “military memetics” and associated information warfare theories, Silicon Valley’s growing political power (including Reddit’s!), and the advent of advanced neural networks that will govern the LikeWars of tomorrow.

Highlights include:

• One of the last interviews with Michael T. Flynn, before he committed some light treason. And a significantly more fun interview with Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, reality-TV villains of The Hills.
  
  
• Plumbing the bizzarre depths of information warfare theory: forgotten military articles down one path, the twisted writings of 8chan trolls down the other. And how they meet in the middle.
  
  
• 35 countries, 16 wars, 9 elections, and one very important fellow named Mark Zuckerberg.
  
  Got questions about this weird intersection of war, politics, and shitposting? Just ask!
  
  Proof: https://twitter.com/etbrooking/status/1047941322034831360
  
  
  -----------------------------------------------------------
  
  IamAbot_v01. Alpha version. Under care of /u/oppon.
  Comment 1 of 1
  Updated at 2018-10-05 19:42:31.113887
  
  Next update in approximately 20 mins at 2018-10-05 20:02:31.113925

Here what I've picked up
On War by Clausewitz

MCDP 1 Warfighting

FMFRP 12-18 Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare

FMFRP 12-13 Maneuver in War

On Grand Strategy

The Art of War by Baron De Jomini

Just and Unjust Wars (apparently it's on the Commandant's reading list too)

Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle

Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare

Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat

Deep Maneuver: Historical Case Studies of Maneuver in Large-Scale Combat Operations (Volume 5)

JP-1 Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States

DoD Law of War Manual

The Soviet Army: Operations and Tactics

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

Napoleonic Warfare: The Operational Art of the Great Campaigns

The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam

Strategy: A History

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World

MCTP 3-01C Machine Guns and Machine Gun Gunnery

Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis

The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006

The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011

Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State

Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq

The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

This is all I can name off the top of my head right now