How I created an authentic flawed hero for my novel while dodging cliches and stereotypes
Hackers in movies these days are ultra-cool. Everyone wants to be like them. Geek is now chic. But it’s so unrealistic. How can someone who spends the majority of their time interacting via a computer develop such mature social skills. And even if they somehow did, a real hacker would never make the time needed to shop for the latest fashions, exfoliate their skin every morning, go to the hairdressers for a beard trim and, worst of all, put up with a fashion model for a long-term girlfriend.
Continue readingIP Address Tracing is Not As Easy as Dan Brown Makes Out
Today, I’ve been reading Dan Brown’s latest thriller, Inferno. In the early part of the book the bad guys, trying to track down the hero whom they know is hiding somewhere in Florence, spot that he has just remotely accessed his email account based in the USA. They obtain the IP address of the computer […]
Continue readingIs Your Cellphone Voicemail Still Wide Open?
There is a scene in my novel where I needed the protagonist, a computer hacker called Brody, to gain access to someone else’s mobile phone voicemail. Like most people, I remember the July 2011 phone hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World. So, at the time of writing the scene in the […]
Continue readingAnonymous Banking for Cybercriminals
Black hat hackers do what they do for a variety of reasons. Some do it for the fun of the challenge. Some to enhance their status amongst their peers. Some to deliberately cause chaos. And then there’s the majority, who do what they do to make money. But if you’re a cybercriminal, how do you […]
Continue readingIs Ethical Hacking Actually Ethical or even Legal?
There are three main generally accepted categories of hacker, each represented by a hat of a different colour: white, grey and black. All of them exploit weaknesses in computer systems and networks. The differences between them are their motivations. The most infamous are the black hat hackers, computer criminals epitomised by Hollywood, whose malicious activities serve their […]
Continue readingHow to Practise Safe Java
While writing my novel Invasion of Privacy, where the main protagonist is a computer hacker, I discovered that hackers like Java. No, more than that, they love Java. And the reason is simple, its security is like Swiss Chess. Full of holes.
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