Claims The Guardian. Well, a few things:
- Hacker refers to a very broad skill set, it doesn’t refer to motives or lack of ethical framework. The term in such case is usually cracker. Many skilled people with a perfectly intact ethical framework are proudly calling themselves hackers.
- Proper hackers have no need to purchase such malware kit, they have the skills to write it themselves.
- There are – contradictory to law enforcement authorities’ views – perfectly good reasons to purchase such stuff without having any offensive or illegal intentions. Such as actually analyzing it in order to use gained knowledge to defend against it.
And yes, I have analyzed malware on my own before I started working for Lavasoft and subsequently FRISK Software nearly a decade ago. Am I the baddy now? Because I am curious and eager to learn? Brave new world …
// Oliver