ProfilingaHacker-Ciag.pdfVIP

Shane Durost COS/PSA 413 Capstone Project Tony Gauvin December 22, 2005 Profiling a Hacker In 1990, Kevin Poulsen took over all the telephone lines going into a Los Angeles radio station to win an automobile in a call-in contest. In 1999, David Smith launched the Melissa Worm that caused more than $80 million dollars worth of damage to businesses. What do these people and millions more have in common? They are all hackers. According to William Tafoya, professor in the national security graduate program at the University of New Haven, cyber-crime profiling is defined as “the investigation, analysis, assessment and reconstruction of data from a behavioral or psychological perspective extracted from computer systems, networks and the humans committing the crimes.” Profiling a hacker is both valuable and dangerous. Identifying a range of characteristics such as motivations and skills, knowledge, resources and access can be very useful in profiling a hacker. The danger is that people will rely on the average profile of a hacker to try and determine an identity. Knowing the motivations of hackers provides assistance in understanding their behaviors and thus can help companies protect their networks better. Identifying the common and unique characteristics of hackers can provide you valuable information that can be used to safeguard your system and further increase your knowledge and forensic practices. It is very important to try to profile a hacker because companies are losing large amounts of money because of security breaches. In 1998, the Computer Security Institute estimated that intrusions cost corporations $236 million in damage (Marcus Rogers Wired News, 01/20/99). A big problem today though is that there are many different kinds of hackers; some good, some bad, some curious, and some malicious. Before the age of computers and