When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when all you have is clip art of a hooded hacker figure…
A Shutterstock image of a mysterious hooded figure haunts hundreds of reports of ghastly security breaches like a Nazgul with RSI. Troy Hunt rounds up some of the many terrible things this unnamed fellow has gotten up to in his career and makes the case that catching this dude should be job one for the cybercops, which should be easy as he's got his own TV show.
The real problem, of course, is that hacking is visually boring; it's most interesting aspect is its anthropology, which is hard to sum up with an image (chatlogs aren't much more interesting than hexdumps).
He fits the profile to a tee – hoodie, obfuscated face and an apparent love of binary, all calling cards of the modern day cyber-hacker. As you can clearly see from the image, he's suspected of perpetrating the massive Yahoo breach which is very serious business indeed. But it's when you start digging deeper that you realise how far this individual's cyber-raiding goes.
Is this hooded cyber-bandit the web's most prolific hacker?
[Troy Hunt]
