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Hackers drawn by thrills, challenge, cash By David McHugh, Special for USA TODAY MOSCOW - Alexei of St. Petersburg cracked his first program when he was 12. Frustrated by a game he couldn't win on his parents' computer, which ran on an Intel 8086 microprocessor, he poked around in the game's programming to make it easier.
Now 20, the technical institute dropout cracks software to order for $50 to $200, defeating security measures, so illegal copies will run on additional computers. He charged one businessman $50 to crack a $3,000 program for automating embroidering machines. His mother, with whom he lives, doesn't approve. "So we try not to cross paths on this topic," he says. Alexei , who declined to give his last name, swaps pirated software under his nickname, Spot, on closed Internet sites limited to members of his group, ScUM ("I forget what it stands for."). He has never met most of the members in person. Cracking presents an intellectual pleasure, he says. "A sporting interest, I would say." With many companies reluctant to hurt their reputation by reporting security breaches to police, private systems specialists often lead the uphill fight against hackers. One of them is Sergei Gruzdev, general director for Israeli-based Aladdin Software Security's Moscow office. Gruzdev, who admits he wrote viruses in his student days, says he's shut down 35 Web sites where hackers were sharing cracked software and hacking tools. Usually, a call to the Internet provider supporting the site does the trick. But Gruzdev sicced the police on the United Crackers League, a St. Petersburg-based group that had figured out how to defeat one of Aladdin's security devices. One of its members, Andrei Lishutin, known as Leshy ("Wood devil" in Russian) was arrested. After that, the group renamed itself United Copyright Protection/Cryptography Labs and says it is now committed to fighting hackers. Hackers, Gruzdev says, "have the attitude (that) 'I don't want to pay $50 to Bill Gates or to Western bourgeois software developers.' It's the psychology of poor people." Some hackers use their skills to make money legally. Aladdin special projects manager Alexei Raevsky, 26, started out by cracking a program for fun when he was a freshman at Moscow's Institute of Physics and Engineering. A classmate handed him a software disk protected by a widely used security program, saying "You're a hacker, hack this." Raevsky, who was writing programs in 10 computer languages by the time he left high school, studied the security measure "to test my skills. I cracked it, naturally." Then he wrote the software maker in Germany, detailing the flaws. The firm responded by giving him contract work and a top-of-the-line laptop computer - a luxury among Moscow students. Now he drives a Volvo and owns his own apartment, an upper-middle-class standard of living. "We have the American approach - if you're so smart, where's your money?" he says. "Some waste time on breaking up Web sites, and my attitude is, why do that if there's no money in it?" Related story: |
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