EH-Net

i see alot of people asking where to start and if this is the right career for them. since i'm already too deep in it to quit i was wondering what people do to get in contact with other "enthusiasts" nearby. sometime i wish i had like a studygroup with the same interest and a place to hang out. any new student should have a master who is willing to train newcomers, or at least direct them in the right way. At this point i discovered hackerspaces. a little info:

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/ (http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/)

i was wondering what your opinion is about these spaces and if there any good for the ethical hacker. most of them have a much wider scope then just ethical hacking wich could drive then away....what do you think?

I was talking to my mentor the other day and brought up the fact that when I was growing up, there were no resources for ethical information security.  I was interested in finding out how things work for their intended and unintended uses.  I had to (and still occasionally) hang out with the "haxors".

I believe the main line of distinction should be intent.  The intent to not do any harm and the desire to further the knowledge of ethical information security.

I think spaces like this are a useful resource, if used appropriately.

I agree with unsupported, intent is the key.  If you can learn from the "haxors" and learn from the way they think, you can become a better ethical hacker.   

I don't even know any real haxors. I only know some people who claim to be hackers, but have little knowledge of computer whatsoever. They talk about hacking people with Python scripts, but when I ask them about how they pulled it off, they say stuff like well I sorta lost my scripts etc :P

Anyway, I always wanted to find someone that can teach me, but apparently that's a lot harder than learning how things work on my own. Besides that, google is a great teacher ;)

More on-topic, as being said before, it's definitely about intent. I believe that every piece of information is useful to the ethical hacker. If you know about all the bad things that are possible, you can also figure out how to protect against them.

ZF

That is a slippery slope.  Any haxor worth his weight would be weary of anyone new poking around and asking questions.  Maybe try to get involved in some communities with local meetings, like 2600 or BinRev.

Cheesy as it may be, there's a pretty large InfoSec community on the Twitter. A bunch of the guys local to me have started up a group called Charmsec (http://charmsec.org/). I know in Boston there's BeanSec (http://www.beansec.org/BeanSec.org/BeanSec.html), and NYSec (http://www.sockpuppet.org/nysec/) in, well, you can probably guess.

Poke around a little bit, and you're sure to find people who share your interests. Have you heard of the freaks that wear diapers or furry costumes? If they can find people to hang out with, a couple of geeks that like to break and fix shit shouldn't have a problem  ;D

Thanks guys, I'll try to find some local people I guess. What I found frustrating is the fact that the guys I thought to be hackers were in fact script kiddies :(. I found out when I really got into security. You don't just hack people with firing Python script at their PC's! They also thought, that knowing Python makes you a hacker lol.

ZF

i guess we all have to start out as script kiddies right? nothing wrong with that, but you need the motivation to go beyond that. keep learning. most important: hack to learn, not the other way round. if you don't, you will always be a script kiddie...

Didn't say there's anything wrong with being a script kiddie as long as you're willing to go beyond that. I just meant to say that lots of people claim to be hackers while they're not, and I started to get the wrong idea about hacking. It's about understanding. Grabbing some script of milw0rm, and defacing websites isn't what I would consider real hacking.

Understanding how things work is always the most important thing to me.

ZF

i totally agree. i believe it makes you a better hacker if you understand the concept behind the hack then when you just run a script and hope for the best...however the borderline between script kiddie and (ethical) hacker are quite grey...