Lisbeth Salander , the hacker - babe champion of Stieg Larsson ’s enormously popular Girl With … novel , infiltrate secured networks and hijacks harddrives with ease . But how naturalistic is the cut up she does?Vanity Fair got the scoopfrom reformed hacker Kevin Poulsen .
Poulsen , a former “ black chapeau ” drudge who ’s now the editor in chief of Wired.com’sThreat Level , pronounce that as far as fictionalized hacking drop dead , Lisbeth Salander ’s cyber subjection are pretty naturalistic , even if the way she goes about doing them are a bit blurry :
Michael Hogan : Is there anything that Lisbeth Salander did that struck you as implausible ?
Kevin Poulsen : The interesting thing is , everything that she does is totally plausible - it ’s the way she does it that is for the most part completely derisory as a technical topic .
Can you excuse ?
Well , she uses a equipment given to her by her other hacker buddy - she commit it over the carbon monoxide - ax cable of the corrupted financier , Hans - Erik Wennerström . The entire description of how that works and how she uses it to get control of his computer is just a fabrication . She key out taking his computer and basically arrange it up so that when this guy thinks he ’s access using his computer , he ’s actually using her waiter - and she ’s able to monitor everything .
Right .
That is n’t how it would be done . But you sure enough are watch these days attack somebody ’s P.C. rather of assault their host , and logging their key strokes and all of that . This is just what the hackers are doing decently now . That ’s what they are doing in financial criminal offense in particular . When you get down to the technical details , it ’s all very fabricated . But the literal capabilities are all totally actual .
And while Poulsen is a cyber-terrorist from a mere era — he ’s infamous for rig a radio competition to make headway a Porsche — he says that there are still some distinct temptations to the world of hacking today :
If you ’re a cyberpunk that shows natural endowment , you could wind up being force to get involved in this sorting of thing . Temptation is far more likely than threats or atmospheric pressure to pull a hacker into this . you could just make so much money so easily and with so short peril - particularly in the easterly European countries , where they are lagging in prosecuting these crimes . For many years , hackers in Russia and former Soviet State Department have been run with near impunity - and making , in some cases , million and millions of clam .
For readers of Larsson ’s Millenium trilogy , or just those interesting in hearing about the state of hacking from an expert , thefull interviewis a fascinating read . Now I ’m going to go run my anti - virus software . [ Vanity Fair ]
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