Hacking's all a game to me
Connecting state and local government leaders
GCN Lab director John Breeden looks at Uplink, a game that takes you back to the golden days of the 56k modem hack.
I’ve just been offered work as a hacker. In the past week I got good money to wipe scientific data from a rival corporation’s database, create a fake university degree for a friend and find the backdoor password to a highly secure government server. And my employers pay very well. Perhaps you also want to give the hacker life a try? We can’t all be l33t, but there are plenty of jobs at all levels for the novice to the expert Neuromancer.
Before our friends at the FBI decide to pay a visit, I should say that all this hacking is just a game. No, really. It’s a surprisingly realistic title called Uplink that simulates hacking. Although it’s dressed in a Hollywood-style like the movies WarGames, Sneakers and Swordfish, a lot of techniques used are those employed by real hackers. Now if you ask me how I know this, I’ll have to plead the Fifth.
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Uplink looks at the old school of hacking, before everything was connected via the Internet. Security on most systems was rather simplistic, but tracing a call back to its source was a real danger for hackers. To compensate, hackers used to have to bounce connections through a series of blind relays where they would dial into one server controlling a phone bank, and then have it dial back out to another. To hack a computer in New York, they might bounce a connection through San Francisco, Hong Kong and Washington, making tracing extremely difficult. Of course this was all done using 56k modems, so it was no real treat, and phone lines could be notoriously corrupt, but the game doesn’t really take that into account. Realism there is sacrificed for fun, so bounce calls all you like.
In Uplink, you go to work for a fictional company that brings hackers and those with hacking needs together. They even provide you with a gateway that is always your first link to the world. If you get traced back to that gateway, all evidence of your work for them is destroyed, though you can still get caught in certain circumstances.
You find jobs on a blind bulletin-board system that are appropriate to your skill level. This isn’t about hacking into Paris Hilton’s cell phone: These are serious hacks. You’ll need to purchase the correct programs to aid in the hack. For example, a dictionary password cracker is fast, but won’t always get you in if people have followed proper password guidelines. Sometimes you have to rely on a brute force cracker, which almost always gets the job done, though slowly. For highly secure hacks where there is likely to be a follow-up investigation, you’ll want to purchase tools to let you edit log files to delete any trace that you were there. And all this is done while your adversary is trying to trace you. Eventually you will even need to upgrade your gateway with a better CPU or memory to handle more advanced hacking tools. It’s all in a day's work.
You can download a trial version of Uplink for Windows, Mac or Linux, or buy a copy of the game for about $10. It also recently moved to Steam, and can be downloaded for the PC there.
If you get caught playing at work, tell them you’re doing research to keep your network safe, or better yet, that you’re an elite hacker who would just hate to ruin your boss’s credit rating over a misunderstanding.
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