Manager as hacker

It was the Mumbai traffic that turned me into a small time hacker," says Rajat Mishra, a manager with a pharma company in Mumbai. "Travelling from Borivli to my office took two hours one way every day, and with only my laptop and the internet to keep me company, I drifted. One day when I came across a blog post about how one can learn to hack in a day, I was hooked."
He is just one of the growing tribe of non-techie Indians who are taking up hacking."There are umpteen number of blogs and do-it-yourself kits freely available online which can teach you the skill within hours," says Raghu Raman, cyber security expert.
The most improbable types are turning into small time hackers, says Shamshad Ahmed, regional director, India Luminescence, a security services company. In fact, there are more instances of non-tech executives giving hacking a shot than tech professionals.
Ahmed remembers an incident that his company encountered recently. A bank had given a service contract of cleaning the premises to a small time firm. One day under the pretext of cleaning up the computers, one of the cleaning crew members actually hacked into the system and installed key loggers onto these machines. Key-loggers are simple pieces of software that record each and every keystroke of the machine they sit on. So this fellow got the entire data of what went on the machine with important financial records of customers in a log every day. This information, of course, he used for financial gains. This went on for almost three months before one of the machines broke down and had to be repaired.
Websense, a web filtering company recently ran a survey with Neilson. "We monitored all kinds of companies," says Surendra Singh, regional director of Websense. The survey for a finance company with 1700 employees that was conducted for over 15 days showed that the employees visited hacking sites and downloaded hacking tools 1013 times as opposed to only 300 hits that came from a software company of equal size.
Such employees perform various tasks with the hacking tools, and for various reasons. Dinesh Rohia first took to hacking when he was an area sales manager and wanted to gauge where he stood on his next appraisal. He managed to hack into his company's network and get the information, but along with his own appraisal data, he also found the file that contained the data of the rest of his team. He started selling this information to head hunters.
According to Ahmed, such inchoate hackers "are also getting inducted into organised crime. There is a complete service industry running on the internet with agencies providing tools and after-sales support too. Hacking tool CDs are available on the streets."