Hacks, Cracks, and DDoS... Oh My.

With the recent antics of LizardSquad FINALLY behind us, we can reflect back on the events of those days and collectively facepalm at how little most media, and indeed most people, know about what constitutes a hack and what does not.

During the outage, no matter where you looked online or even on your local television station, you'd see so many people misrepresenting what LizardSquad did as being a hack rather than a DDoS attack. Even LizardSquad themselves tried to suggest that they had to have hacking skills in order to pull off their simultaneous attacks on both Xbox Live and Playstation Network.

I thought it might be prudent and helpful to define these buzzwords so commonly thrown about online these days so that if you know anyone that is speaking about DDoS attacks like they are hacks, you can bring them here and hopefully cure them of their ignorance. We'll start with what a hack is.

A hack is manipulating computer code to perform something other than its original intent, or to perform it better, usually without any malicious intent. A hacker is someone who is proficient with technology. The kind of person who takes apart code, analyzes it, and puts it back together again to gain a better understanding of it, or to see what they can make it do. Hacks are things like mods for example. Taking pre-existing code and changing it, or creating compatible code to add something new or improve on something that already exists. Obviously that's just a small definition of what a hack/hacker is, there's much more to go into but basically a hack in tech terms is a way of using that tech to do new and different things just because it's fun and/or you're trying to make something better or easier to use etc...

What is a crack then? A crack is essentially the same thing but focuses more on breaking the security of something in order to achieve some malicious, or comparatively malicious end. I say comparatively malicious because some people wouldn't consider cracking the security of some software to be malicious, but the companies that make said software certainly do. Think of cracks as hacks for criminals, and remember that morals are a huge grey area, especially in things like software piracy a.k.a. file sharing.

There's this prevailing idea that hackers are actually more skilled than crackers, as hackers actually learn about programs, disassemble them, rebuild them, etc... While crackers typically use already existing programs to suit their usually criminal or self-serving ends and don't really possess that much skill to begin with. Whether or not that's true I suppose depends on the people.

What hacks and cracks share in common is that both typically require actually manipulating code, whether the hacker/cracker is doing it themselves or using a third party program. DDoS is an entirely different beast altogether.

So what is a DDoS attack?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service and really the name is quite succinct in explaining what it is. A DDoS basically denies service to any outside request.

A DDoS attack can be done in many ways, but typically someone who wants to perform a DDoS uses what's known as "botnets" which are networks of computers that can actually be your own computer that was infected via malware to be a part of said network without your knowledge, but that's not actually a requirement. A DDoS attack is essentially this network of computers making bogus ping requests, or sending random junk data to a server to flood its bandwidth and thus cause the server to overload and shut down. DDoS requires no ability to manipulate code in any way, nor does it really require the ability to break security as most online services, and especially Xbox Live and PSN, are designed to be open to public use.

DDoS is actually a huge problem. Botnets that can cause DDoS attacks can be bought. I personally read that $150 can buy you a botnet that will attempt to perform a DDoS attack for a week straight on specialized "black market" online markets. The fact that you can buy a DDoS attack pretty much eliminates the necessity of knowing anything about code by itself, but even the people selling a botnet don't need to know anything about code. Everything you need to perform a DDoS attack is available online and is as simple as starting a program.

So whenever someone tries to say that LizardSquad are hackers that hacked into Live and PSN and brought it down, you can point them to this blog post and show them that the most that LizardSquad did was double click a program to activate it. Nothing about what happened to PSN and Live over Christmas required knowing the ins and outs of both services security, even if LizardSquad wants to claim that one was harder to take down than the other. Nothing of what LizardSquad did requires any programming skill in any way, and even if it did they'd be crackers, not hackers.

I hope I was able to clear that mess up somewhat, though I suspect that most of the people here already know all of this information. Believe me, if I could spread this info to places like local tv stations so that nobodies like LizardSquad don't receive undue praise, I would.

Feel free to argue about whether or not a DDoS can be stopped in the comments.