The Orion Symposium gives the right of presentation to all groups discriminated against in our society. One of those groups we all ignore is hackers. Now Mr X from the PZRZYo Hacker Society will, in hologram form, remotely tell us more about the development of viruses and the problems in their testing. You’ll hear about the state of hacking today and in the future. Bonus: What qualities should a metropolitan hacker possess to have a successful career?
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A hologram appears and a disguised voice begins to speak.
Hacking Today
Hacking and viruses are around you everywhere and all the time, and you are unlikely to be aware of them. Have you ever gone to celebrate Great Chik Chik Eel Day and then taken the Trans-galactic Express home? If you live on one of the 20 planets in the Chik Chik Beta system, the answer is most likely ‘Yes’. But has it ever been the case that the tickets had been sold out or cost 3,000 Galactic Dollars (100 times more than normal)? Tickets for an almost infinitely long express train should theoretically never sell out (at least this is what its creator claims). People think it’s a bug of the train, but more often than not it’s simple hacking. Why? A hacker bot buys up all almost-infinite tickets for microtebis and then offers them to wealthy pensioners desperate to get home at hundreds of times higher prices.
Anyone who owns a modern flat today definitely has a smart sink. The smart sink reads your current emotions and releases liquid at the ideal temperature and pressure to refresh you and relieve your concerns or meet whatever other needs you have – washing the dishes, your face, etc. A couple of tebis ago, there was a bubble in the rates of interior decorators, followed by a period where they all went out of business. How are they now some of the highest-paid professionals, and you have to make an appointment for three tebis in the future? Our hacker group was commissioned to hack all sinks in the Centaur T sector and flood all homes. Wet furniture is not that great, right? Good marketing, don’t you think?
If you pilot a tirob (HGV spaceship), you probably listen to one of the most popular reality shows in interstellar space – Spicy and True: Hacked en-route by an honest bolt. This is a radio reality show, where hackers hack people’s conversations live on air, with their algorithm selecting the spiciest scandals or declarations of love. The presenters give a live commentary on what’s happening. You can even bet on how it’d all turn out, or you can just phone in and ask for a shout-out to Kolyo for his birthday.
As hackers, we also often participate in election campaigns. This is a more expensive service, as a lot of heuristics have to be used in coming up with new ways of manipulating the masses. There are two main approaches to winning elections: attract new voters to your cause (if you have one) or (if you don’t have a cause and just want to absorb funds from the Stellar Union) vilify your competition as much as possible. One tebi ago, the group which had attacked Chik Chik Beta attacked it again. The opposition had hired them to malign the government. As you know, it is common practice to hold barbecue banquets just before an election. The contract hackers hacked all the smart grills and burnt all the appetisers to a crisp. So the voters were very disappointed and decided they should have lunch all day on election day. See how a smart grill can bring down the government?!
Problems in Virus Testing
When anyone hears the word ‘hacker’, they imagine some nerd in a movie taking down a drone or gaining access to an SPS (stellar power station) network in 3 presses of the keyboard. In reality, hacking and writing viruses is a complex and time-consuming task. In the next section, we’ll explain that you should have many more qualities than simply being a very good coder. First, to take down a military drone or hack into a factory network, you need to find out the technology on which their software system is based. Since there are over 100,000 programming languages, to be a very good hacker, you’d usually specialise in a small number of them. Not that there are no genius hackers who can work with half of them, but the point is that even they don’t know everything.
There’re many viruses that have made their creators very rich bourgeois. But to become a rich bourgeois, your virus must first work properly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to test a polymorphic virus? In short, those types of viruses encrypt themselves and, at the same time, alter their code to hide from anti-virus and anti-pest software. But since Agile methodology is used for their development, you need to test your virus iteratively, i.e. you need to insert hidden ways of detecting it while you’re running the tests. If you skip this step, you’ll infect your machine and you’ll have to destroy it (we recommend incineration with a blowtorch at 1,056.66 degrees and pouring carbidetox acid from Lake Chakarunga over the remains). You need to remove those “back doors” before you go into PROD, otherwise security software might find and use them. But if you remove them and accidentally get infected with your own virus – DISASTER@! Your progeny will rob your money and send it back to your account. Could be worse, yes, but for every legal or illegal trans-galactic banking transaction, you usually pay 5 intergalactic cents. This recursive siphoning will eventually cost you your house, mansion, island and possibly kidney, if you have one, + the bath in which they’ll take it out for (don’t worry, the ice usually comes free of charge).
No matter what virus you’re writing, if it’s intended to infect the masses, you’ll have to test it on all possible combinations of hardware and operating systems (and there are hundreds of them – just like the number of corporate ketchup and gherkin producers …)
Inevitably, there are also a lot of side costs to security software. You’ll ask why does he of all people need security software? Well, you need to test whether various antivirus programs detect it. If it fails the automatic test, then you’ll need to update your virus and test it again. And speaking of updating, you must be sure that this functionality in your application works properly before you go into PROD. Otherwise, it’s game over for your brilliantly beautiful virus. And you must have adequate protection from other hacker groups. You usually don’t want someone to steal your virus source code. And at $100 per license, you save 3 tebis on development and support of something that people have devised long before you. It’s much better to be a bourgeois hacker writing your viruses in peace than having to engage in such bot-based activities. Taking into account the listing price of Aldebaran gherkins and the share price of the Andromeda South SPS, you’d save an average of $56,700 on self-development of security software by buying an off-the-shelf package. You can instead invest those dollars in hiring at least 31.33 djondjonbolcheta to comprehensively test your creations.
Note (for bourgeois hackers): A lot of being a hacker entails participating in a club founded by other bourgeois hackers. That’s all well and good, but there are certain requirements. The most important one is to be a gentleman and follow the etiquette down to a tee, i.e. knowing how to drink tea properly. I’ll show you a version abridged 1,456-fold of this part of the code of conduct (you can read the full version in “The Most Complete Pocket Guide for the Bourgeois Hacker Gentlemen with 100,000 Tips - 46th Edition”). Tea is always drunk before 4 pm Kra Kra planetary time. It’s a good idea to buy a watch that shows that time even if it’s 49 hours and 5 microtebis on your planet. This is a legacy reason, as the first such gentleman hackers hail from there. The cup is also a very important part of the ritual. It should be exactly 125 m and 34 g. Always brew loose-leaf tea, rather than teabags. Serve with a pot of hot water/milk and a bowl of sugar. It’s very important to have a 27 cm cloth napkin. Always drink it in a sitting position with your back straight. It’s proper etiquette to wait at least 7 microtebis before you drink first. It actually used to be considered disrespectful to drink first when you’re a guest. Always reach with one of your right arms or limbs. It should be finished before 38 microtebis have passed, when it would’ve gone completely cold. This is also the perfect length of an intellectual conversation, because everything after is just an unnecessary stretching of time. So I recommend – if you want to be part of our society, please learn to make and drink tea properly!!! (Those fruit-flavoured abominations with caramel bits are not tea, and if we witness such an obscenity – be warned – not only will we reject your application, but we’ll also steal all your source code!)
Qualities of a Successful Hacker
Of course, without being really good at writing code, you can’t be a hacker. Unless you outsource development, i.e. hire some djondjonbolche to bring your ideas to life at a lower price. But you still have to be technically literate.
You have to be a very good analytical thinker, since you’ll have to find out exactly what you are hacking and what technologies and languages it is written in. You must be ready to root around refuse bins and arrange shredded confidential documents like a puzzle to retrieve the information. Very often, you need to have at least a few friends, at least one of whom has to go undercover in the establishment that will be hacked if it’s of brick-and-mortar type: SSP, bank, factory, etc. That is, you must have some basic social skills. At other times, you may need to react faster and bribe certain officials. The study of sociology and psychology can be quite helpful in such cases. You’ll be highly dependent on those officials, so you’ll have to take them out to the right places with the right type of men/women and you’ll have to know the colour of the cocktail you’ll buy for them.
Besides drinking tea, every self-respecting bourgeois hacker must be able to write grammatically. So help you God if there’re spelling mistakes in the phishing message to the wealthy pensioners who have to send you money because they think you’re their son who has broken his clavicle on a hiking trip in the Kra Kra mountains.
Hackers must have a very good understanding of emotions. As you know, we use many emotion-capturing devices. In order to use the emotions after you’ve stolen them, you need to be able to understand them. By reading a person’s emotions, you can find out their passwords or figure out which pyjamas would move them emotionally and sell them at a triple price through your offshore company for stylish gentleman’s pyjamas, the latest Italian fashion.
Last but not least, you must be a financial wizard. You won’t become rich if you don’t know how to hide your hard-earned money. The galactic tax office is ever vigilant and should not be underestimated. It’s always good to know how to avoid some tax or other. And if you can also invest in bonds/shares, so much the better for you. You have be the king of offshore dealings and Caymans-based companies.
How to Earn Like a Hacker?
There are different ways to earn like a hacker, depending on whether you are mediocre or not. If you don’t want to fully dedicated yourself to the profession, so you can continue to have a social life and the occasional quiet drink of tea, here are some ideas. You can hack the algorithms that compose songs for the galactic charts. This way, you can short the company’s stock if the song is very bad and earn yourself a tidy sum. Of course, if you have no idea whether a song is a hit-in-the-making or not, it’s better to consult with a specialist in confidence.
Another idea off the top of my head is to do business in baby upgrades – still quite fashionable and popular. With good marketing, you’ll find customers in the more suburban parts of the galaxy. The idea is that babies usually come out of the labs with factory-locked capabilities. That is, when they grow up and decide to unlock better memory, vision or RAM, this is not an actual upgrade; rather, the capability is simply unlocked with a code. For modest amounts remitted to the Caymans, you can unlock everything in early childhood if the parents want a wunderkind. Of course, every individual has their own personal features, which is how we’re all different, but nobody can argue with 100GB RAM. If you’re not competent enough to do the full unlocking, a cheaper option would be to hack the transport system of the hospital/veterinary unit. Once in, you simply have to redirect a fully unlocked baby to another location and swap them. It’s unlikely that anyone would notice. Possibly… Just make sure they are of the same species, otherwise it’ll be embarrassing.
If you’re in the top 10% of hacking capabilities, then there’s a chance to earn a quick buck for one or two planets with a personal ocean and a view of three suns of different colours (the rarer colour combinations are more expensive, but the tan they can give you is very interesting. For example, my favourite rare combination is purple #6c4675 + pink #e3b1d2 + orange #FF6600). You can also make such money during hybrid warfare by penetrating the enemy’s SPS systems. Another way is to offer some of the most wanted types of viruses:
virus affecting the ruling algorithms by changing their morals;
virus that alters and modifies combat simulators (we are talking about the simulations we mentioned in the previous lecture, which simulate the entire galaxy and theoretical combat);
virus increasing the fuel consumption of all starships ordered by one of the fuel cartels (they’re known to give very large bonuses + a lifetime supply of free fuel)
Hacking in the Future
One of the directions in which hacking is going is that the intergalactic government is considering legalising the practice, following the example of prostitution and drugs. It happens anyway and we can’t stop it however hard we try – so let’s tax it at least! So, very soon, if you hire one of us, you may also receive an invoice by mail and would have to pay VAT.
Another popular thing happening right now, a new movement so to speak, is hacking as a service. This means, you pay a monthly subscription, whether you use our services or not. But you have a personal hacker on retainer. He can get you a “free” parking space in the crowded mall in your neighbourhood or flood your neighbour’s flat – the one who makes a lot of noise at night. Or he can simply ensure you always have a day or two of paid leave left.
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The power goes off and the hologram disappears. (Obviously, the aim is to avoid the asking of inconvenient questions).
Testing in the Galaxy- Chapter 1- “The Testing Symposium Orion”
Testing in the Galaxy- Chapter 7: Testing the Tourism and Consulting Services
