Originally a hacker was used to describe someone very knowledgeable with computers, while a cracker was someone who broke into networks and wreaked havoc. But the media took the term "hacker" and demonized it into a term used to describe someone who cracks into protected systems. Notice how that is termed. A hacker cracks into protected systems. A person who takes advantage of known vulnerabilities on unprotected systems is known as a script kiddy. Script kiddies often have little knowledge of what he is really doing, but they cause the greatest damage and greatest threat to most businesses. It is because of these script kiddies that you must keep your software up to date and spend so much on security.

So what can you do about script kiddies? The first thing to do is realize who these people are. These can be your employees, or they can be some mischievous teenager from the outside who you don't know and they might not even know who they are dealing with. The employee script kiddy is the most dangerous because he has access to the inside of your network. Very few companies bother locking down their internal network. That is something we will cover in next week's news article.

As far as external script kiddies they tend to scan large ranges of IPs to see if there is any open ports then take advantage of the known and documented vulnerabilities. They also try and trick users into divulging confidential information such as user names and password, or they send viruses thru email.

Call us at The Net Secure for a consultation.