Who said hackers were always the bad guys? While the term "hacker" is generally synonymous with crime, that's not always the case. Indeed, there are those within the cybersphere who have the skills of the greatest cybercriminals but choose to use them for good instead of evil. This unique brand of e-superhero is called the White Hat Hacker, and they're becoming an increasingly important asset in the ongoing fight against cybercrime.
A hack on a printer, and other White Hat tricks
The emergence of the Internet of Things is ushering in new developments in almost every conceivable piece of technology, including printers. But with the push toward IoT-connected devices comes a new batch of security concerns, something that security researcher Michael Jordon revealed in a very colorful way, according to BBC News.
According to the article, Jordon had particular concerns about printers from Canon's new Pixma range, which, like other IoT devices, are accessible through the Internet. Jordon told BBC News about his suspicion that, due to a security loophole with the printers, the status of many of them would be available to a random person like him. To put this theory to the test, Jordon began running relatively simple searches to see how many Pixma devices were discoverable to ordinary Web-surfers like him. As it turns out, there were thousands of printers vulnerable to attack.
Next came the fun part for Mr. Jordon: actually carrying out such an attack. But unlike malicious hackers, who might have used the opportunity to install data or money-sucking malware, Jordon's sole goal with his printer hack was to prove that it could be done. Therefore, he did something that has surely vaulted him to heroism within the realm of geekdom: He got the original video game "Doom" to run on the Pixma printers. As Jordon explained, the printer's screen size and resolution were actually uniquely suited to running the legacy game.
"The printer has a 32-bit Arm processor, 10 meg of memory and even the screen is the right size," he said. "I had all the bits, but it was a coding problem to get it all running together."
Once he succeeded in getting the "hack" up and running, it quickly gained momentum beyond the geek community, and caught the attention of Canon executives, who promised to fix the problem Jordon had creatively exposed.
Jordon's not the only White Hat Hacker out there
Fortunately for everyone, Jordon's not the only hacker extraordinaire to don the white hat. Here are some other benevolent hackers that effectively prevented real crimes from happening:
- J. Alex Halderman: Back in 2010, Halderman – a professor at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering – hacked into the trial phase of a voting system in Washington, D.C, to prove that the supposedly safe system was actually highly vulnerable to attack. Once Halderman and his co-hackers got into the system, they totally com​mandeered it, changing all votes to votes for noted robots like HAL 9000 and even programming the University of Michigan's school fight song to play whenever a vote was submitted. Because it was only a trial website, however, no actual harm was done, and Halderman's work led the site's developers to go back to the drawing board.
- Tiffany Rad and John Strauchs: The doors to a prison swing open, remotely controlled by a hacker across the globe. Eager prisoners walk out of their cells, through the front gates and into the world. As Strauchs and Rad found out, this scenario is highly plausible. The two experts examined the security system of an unspecified correctional facility and discovered that a hacker could easily take control of that system and use it to do things like shut off alarms and open doors – all from a remote location.
