Getting into the mind of your hacking character.

Before we begin, I want you to read the Hacker’s Manifesto. It’s a little dated, but the meaning shines through.

That is the best way I can think of to introduce you to your hacking character.

Hacking is a power rush, the ability to do things others didn’t even know to be possible. Hacking is usually illegal; it is an adrenaline buzz. Hacking is a puzzle to the unchallenged mind. If you character doesn’t want at least one of those things, chances are they got bored or discouraged after a few days of looking into hacking. So, now that you know a little about the mind behind the hacks, let’s talk about what hacking is.

What is hacking?

Hacking, originally did not have a bad connotation. It simply meant to take a bunch of programs that other people had written and to “hack” parts of them together into your own code. When someone says something is a “hack job”, well, that’s pretty much what any code written on a tight schedule looks like. Cracking, however, was the term for when people took your code and tried to break it for profit or giggles. Today, however, hacking and cracking are practically synonymous, so I will be using hacking in the “breaking into other people’s computers” sense.

I looked around the internet for a good, low-tech definition of hacking. There are not a lot of them. There is a lot about ‘manipulating networks’ and ‘gaining unintended permissions in a program’ which is what a hacker does, yes, and they all sound appropriately vague and scary. However, unless you really understand what manipulating or permission means, and what networks and programs are, then this does nothing to tell you what hacking is. So, forget computers for just a moment.

Imagine you are at a party, and the host wants to serve some cheese with their cheap party wine. So, they put a plate, a knife, and a block of cheese in front of you. They ask you to arrange a cheese plate. It is very obvious what the plate, the knife, and the cheese are all there for. When the host put them in front of you, at no point did they think that you might do anything with that plate, knife, and cheese besides make a cheese plate. Now, imagine that instead of making a cheese plate, you use the knife to break into their locked wine cellar, the block of cheese to bribe the dog standing guard, and the plate as a frisbee-like distraction thrown into the crowd of party guests. Victorious, you flee the house with their finest wine in hand. Hacking, much like this strange escapade, takes advantage of the fact that someone was not expecting you to use their tool or their security system in that particular strange and convoluted way. They didn’t think to put up extra protections or give you explicit instructions to prevent you from doing the strange thing, because they never even imagined it was an option. Ignoring the context of computers, hacking is looking at something that someone else has made, then using it in unexpected ways or exploiting small weaknesses to get things that you weren’t supposed to have.

Hacking requires mind bending creativity, more research and knowledge than even the person who created the system had, and large tropical islands worth of caffeine induced focus. Progress might come only after hours, days, and weeks worth of work and research. This might not always be the most interesting thing to show or tell your audience, but handled properly, a scene about hacking can be both exciting and give your audience a glimpse into a world just as different and fascinating as any fantasy setting.

Colored Hat Hacking

Hacking comes in many flavors on the morality spectrum, and the hat color spectrum. “Black Hats” is the name for hackers who crack into systems for reasons of personal gain or even reasons like fun and anarchy. The opposite of black hat hackers are “White Hats”. Sometimes a company will hire a team of white hat hackers and challenge them to break into their system. The company wants to test their security and find any weaknesses before someone else does. This is often referred to as “Penetration Testing”. There is a long history of rouge hackers getting caught and deciding to use their skills legally. They become security consultants and only using their skills to hack into places that give them permission. “Grey Hat” hackers are somewhere in the middle, but what defines a grey hat hacker is not as clear as the other two.

Another morally gray type of hacker, this one without a hat color, are hacktivists. These are hackers that are politically motivated. Political motivation can range from shutting down the website of a company they don’t like, to providing uncensored internet access to activist movements like the Arab Spring. For example, the amorphous collection of hackers known as Anonymous, while often carrying out extremely illegal hacks, is usually publicized for hacktivist endeavors such as crashing the websites of companies or governments that they feel are being unjust.

When you are developing your hacker character, think about which moral hat they wear, and if it has always been the same one. Many black hat hackers end up switching to white hat jobs after they get in trouble with the law. Or, a white hat hacker might enter different territory, becoming a hacktivist for a cause that they feel isn’t being handled properly by their government. A character that occasionally wears more than one hat can be a good way to explore some topics in morality while you write, or, more simply, it can be a quick way to add a bit of character depth.

Technical vs Social Hacking

There are two main classes of tools available to the average hacker: Technical and social. Technical hacking is what you typically think of when you think of hacking, sitting behind a computer and doing clever things from a million miles away to crack a password. Social hacking, more commonly known as ‘Social Engineering’, is walking up to the person in the front lobby and asking very nicely for their password, please. That works a surprising amount of the time.

Technical hacking comes in a broad range of difficulty. Some of the best hackers and security professors in the world will spend years working on super technical and academic hacks. Those require extensive knowledge and research of the car, phone, or computer that they are hacking. On the easier side of the spectrum, there are a few free programs that a determined middle schooler could figure out in an evening to steal their school’s wifi password. Most of these technical hacks revolve around that idea of using parts of the program in ways that they weren’t meant to be used. If your hacker character is the sort that prefers computers to people, they will probably use these techniques more often.

Social Engineering involves a lot of con-artistry and dumpster diving. Instead of using a program in a way it wasn’t meant to be used, it takes advantage of people in a way that they weren’t expecting. People, usually by nature, want to be helpful and friendly, and social engineers will take advantage of that. They will ask for innocuous things and hope that the person they are tricking doesn’t understand the importance of what the social hacker just asked for. For example, those numbers on the bottom of your laptop, are those security sensitive? What about just plugging in a usb to check the contents? Or even just mentioning that your boss couldn’t have scheduled an appointment for right now, because she is in a meeting? In different contexts, these can be very useful to a social engineer.

Both White Hat and Black Hat hackers will often use a combination of these two tools to get access to that thing that they are not supposed to have. Many techniques will be some combination of the two types. It is probably important to put a little time into deciding what kind of tools your character uses, and the personality that your character currently has is not necessarily the only thing that you should consider.

Technical hacking might be necessary for your plot, but the descriptions can be dry or confusing. Simplifying the description to the typical fingers flying over a keyboard might be easier on the audience, but by not explaining how the hack works, your hacker character may seem mysterious and magic. Mysterious and magic is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe your main character understands nothing about computers and making the hacker character appear magical is exactly what you want. In that case, stick with quick Hollywood-esque descriptions.

Using social engineering tools, on the other hand, can be a good way to show off how clever your character is in a way that the audience can intuitively understand. There is a more immediate level of ‘cool’ for social engineering because the audience feels like the character is doing something which is only a few steps away from what they could do themselves. The down side is, that these hacks can take longer to write. They require set up and dialogue and full explanations to really communicate to your audience how clever your character is. If your hacker is a secondary character, you may simply not have the word count to add a social engineering hack for them to prove how clever they are, and so you need to stick to a quick “typing at a keyboard” scene. The other problem with social engineering is that, because social interaction is something that everyone know a lot about, your average audience might be more critical of a shaky plot. If you can’t find a really clever con that fits your story, then a mediocre one might stretch the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

This is all not to say that you can’t have a social engineering hack that makes readers feel like the character is performing magic or a technical hack that is easy and intuitive to understand, they’ll just be harder scenes to write.

For more hacking

So, there you go. An introduction to hackers. Now, you should be able to more knowledgeably design a more realistic and complex hacker character and understand a little more about what hacking actually is. If you are after more specifics on how to actually write the details of a hacking scene, different kinds of hacking, or some believable jargon that you can sprinkle in, then check out future posts on hacking.

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