The End Justifies the Means

“I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it’s the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known.”

Instead of focusing on anything technical when I worked on this blog regarding security, I decided that I was going to focus more on possible hacker psycology. The subject is of course the hacker Phobia. From what I see here, what he wants to do is basically show the flaws in security systems. In order to do this he worked his way into Mat Honen’s twitter account by means of impersonating him and using several round about tactics to get into his Apple account, which allowed him access to every other account of Mat Honen. It would seem that being able to get into a person’s account is a lot easier than most would think and this certainly did reveal security flaws in Apple’s system. However, was it worth it?

The Cost

Most of Mr. Honen’s life was on his network. As he mentioned pictures of his realitives and pictures of the first year of his daughter’s life were on there. Because Phobia tried to prove a point Mr. Honen almost lost an incredible amount of precious data and memories. Phobia’s cause did indeed seem righteous, however, it was probably not worth nearly erasing so many memories of a single human being.

Phobia’s Response

What was unusual was Phobia’s response to these questions. Mat Honen relates that when he had a live chat with Phobia he stated “‘yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers.'” Phobia’s reasoning for attack Honen was so that he could help people overcome Hackers, but he also said he doesn’t know why he hacks sometimes. Maybe, Phobia has way too much time on his hands, maybe Phobia sees himself as sort of a vigilante fighting other hackers by revealing their secrets. What is unusal is that the way he rationalizes it, he feels remorse, but he essentially feels like he is doing a good thing. Well, it probably didn’t feel that way to Mat Honen.

~ by graham19 on October 3, 2012 .