Hackers: the internet's immune system | Keren Elazari

Four years ago,

a security researcher,

or, as most people would call it, a hacker,

found a way to literally

make ATMs throw money at him.

His name was Barnaby Jack,

and this technique was later called "jackpotting"

in his honor.

I'm here today because I think

we actually need hackers.

Barnaby Jack

could have easily turned

into a career criminal or James Bond villain

with his knowledge,

but he chose to show the world

his research instead.

He believed that sometimes

you have to demo a threat

to spark a solution.

And I feel the same way.

That's why I'm here today.

We are often terrified and fascinated

by the power hackers now have.

They scare us.

But the choices they make

have dramatic outcomes

that influence us all.

So I am here today because I think we need hackers,

and in fact, they just might be

the immune system for the information age.

Sometimes they make us sick,

but they also find those hidden threats

in our world,

and they make us fix it.

I knew that I might get hacked

for giving this talk,

so let me save you the effort.

In true TED fashion,

here is my most embarrassing picture.

But it would be difficult for you to find me in it,

because I'm the one who looks like a boy

standing to the side.

I was such a nerd back then

that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team

wouldn't let me join.

This is who I was,

but this is who I wanted to be:

Angelina Jolie.

She portrayed Acid Burn

in the '95 film "Hackers."

She was pretty and she could rollerblade,

but being a hacker, that made her powerful.

And I wanted to be just like her,

so I started spending a lot of time

on hacker chat rooms and online forums.

I remember one late night

I found a bit of PHP code.

I didn't really know what it did,

but I copy-pasted it

and used it anyway

to get into a password-protected site

like that.

Open Sesame.

It was a simple trick,

and I was just a script kiddie back then,

but to me, that trick,

it felt like this,

like I had discovered limitless potential

at my fingertips.

This is the rush of power that hackers feel.

It's geeks just like me

discovering they have access to superpower,

one that requires the skill and tenacity

of their intellect,

but thankfully no radioactive spiders.

But with great power

comes great responsibility,

and you all like to think that if we had such powers,

we would only use them for good.

But what if you could read your ex's emails,

or add a couple zeros to your bank account.

What would you do then?

Indeed, many hackers do not resist

those temptations,

and so they are responsible in one way or another

to billions of dollars lost each year

to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft,

which is a serious issue.

But there are other hackers,

hackers who just like to break things,

and it is precisely those hackers

that can find the weaker elements in our world

and make us fix it.

This is what happened last year

when another security researcher

called Kyle Lovett

discovered a gaping hole

in the design of certain wireless routers

like you might have in your home or office.

He learned that anyone could remotely connect

to these devices over the Internet

and download documents from hard drives

attached to those routers,

no password needed.

He reported it to the company, of course,

but they ignored his report.

Perhaps they thought universal access

was a feature, not a bug,

until two months ago

when a group of hackers used it

to get into people's files.

But they didn't steal anything.

They left a note:

Your router and your documents

can be accessed by anyone in the world.

Here's what you should do to fix it.

We hope we helped.

By getting into people's files like that,

yeah, they broke the law,

but they also forced that company

to fix their product.

Making vulnerabilities known to the public

is a practice called full disclosure

in the hacker community,

and it is controversial,

but it does make me think of how hackers

have an evolving effect on technologies we use

every day.

This is what Khalil did.

Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank,

and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook

which he attempted to report

through the company's bug bounty program.

These are usually great arrangements for companies

to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities

they find in their code.

Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications,

his report was not acknowledged.

Frustrated with the exchange,

he took to use his own discovery

to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall.

This got their attention, all right,

and they fixed the bug,

but because he hadn't reported it properly,

he was denied the bounty usually paid out

for such discoveries.

Thankfully for Khalil,

a group of hackers were watching out for him.

In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars

to reward him for this discovery,

raising a vital discussion in the technology industry

about how we come up with incentives

for hackers to do the right thing.

But I think there's a greater story here still.

Even companies founded by hackers,

like Facebook was,

still have a complicated relationship

when it comes to hackers.

And so for more conservative organizations,

it is going to take time and adapting

in order to embrace hacker culture

and the creative chaos that it brings with it.

But I think it's worth the effort,

because the alternative,

to blindly fight all hackers,

is to go against the power you cannot control

at the cost of stifling innovation

and regulating knowledge.

These are things that will come back and bite you.

It is even more true

if we go after hackers

that are willing to risk their own freedom

for ideals like the freedom of the web,

especially in times like this, like today even,

as governments and corporates

fight to control the Internet.

I find it astounding

that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace

can become its voice of opposition,

its last line of defense even,

perhaps someone like Anonymous,

the leading brand of global hacktivism.

This universal hacker movement

needs no introduction today,

but six years ago

they were not much more than an Internet subculture

dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats

and Internet trolling campaigns.

Their moment of transformation was in early 2008

when the Church of Scientology

attempted to remove certain leaked videos

from appearing on certain websites.

This is when Anonymous was forged

out of the seemingly random collection

of Internet dwellers.

It turns out,

the Internet doesn't like it

when you try to remove things from it,

and it will react with cyberattacks

and elaborate pranks

and with a series of organized protests

all around the world,

from my hometown of Tel Aviv

to Adelaide, Australia.

This proved that Anonymous and this idea

can rally the masses from the keyboards

to the streets,

and it laid the foundations

for dozens of future operations

against perceived injustices

to their online and offline world.

Since then, they've gone after many targets.

They've uncovered corruption, abuse.

They've hacked popes and politicians,

and I think their effect is larger

than simple denial of service attacks

that take down websites

or even leak sensitive documents.

I think that, like Robin Hood,

they are in the business of redistribution,

but what they are after isn't your money.

It's not your documents. It's your attention.

They grab the spotlight for causes they support,

forcing us to take note,

acting as a global magnifying glass

for issues that we are not as aware of

but perhaps we should be.

They have been called many names

from criminals to terrorists,

and I cannot justify their illegal means,

but the ideas they fight for

are ones that matter to us all.

The reality is,

hackers can do a lot more than break things.

They can bring people together.

And if the Internet doesn't like it

when you try to remove things from it,

just watch what happens

when you try to shut the Internet down.

This took place in Egypt in January 2011,

and as President Hosni Mubarak

attempted a desperate move

to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo,

he sent his personal troops

down to Egypt's Internet service providers

and had them physically kill the switch

on the country's connection to the world overnight.

For a government to do a thing like that

was unprecedented,

and for hackers, it made it personal.

Hackers like the Telecomix group

were already active on the ground,

helping Egyptians bypass censorship

using clever workarounds like Morse code

and ham radio.

It was high season for low tech,

which the government couldn't block,

but when the Net went completely down,

Telecomix brought in the big guns.

They found European service providers

that still had 20-year-old

analog dial-up access infrastructure.

They opened up 300 of those lines

for Egyptians to use,

serving slow but sweet Internet connection

for Egyptians.

This worked.

It worked so well, in fact,

one guy even used it to download an episode

of "How I Met Your Mother."

But while Egypt's future is still uncertain,

when the same thing happened in Syria

just one year later,

Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines,

and Anonymous,

they were perhaps the first international group

to officially denounce the actions

of the Syrian military

by defacing their website.

But with this sort of power,

it really depends on where you stand,

because one man's hero

can be another's villain,

and so the Syrian Electronic Army

is a pro-Assad group of hackers

who support his contentious regime.

They've taken down multiple high-profile targets

in the past few years,

including the Associated Press's Twitter account,

in which they posted a message

about an attack on the White House

injuring President Obama.

This tweet was fake, of course,

but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index

that day was most certainly not,

and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now.

In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula

to Latin America,

from Europe to the United States,

hackers are a force for social,

political and military influence.

As individuals or in groups,

volunteers or military conflicts,

there are hackers everywhere.

They come from all walks of life,

ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add.

They are now shaping the world's stage.

Hackers represent an exceptional force for change

in the 21st century.

This is because access to information

is a critical currency of power,

one which governments would like to control,

a thing they attempt to do by setting up

all-you-can-eat surveillance programs,

a thing they need hackers for, by the way.

And so the establishment has long had

a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers,

because the same people who demonize hacking

also utilize it at large.

Two years ago,

I saw General Keith Alexander.

He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander,

but instead of his four star general uniform,

he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

This was at DEF CON,

the world's largest hacker conference.

Perhaps like me, General Alexander

didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas.

I think he saw untapped potential.

In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch.

"In this room right here," he said,

"is the talent our nation needs."

Well, hackers in the back row replied,

"Then stop arresting us."

(Applause)

Indeed, for years,

hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence,

but in light of what we know now,

who is more watchful of our online world?

The rules of the game are not that clear anymore,

but hackers are perhaps the only ones

still capable of challenging overreaching governments

and data-hoarding corporates

on their own playing field.

To me, that represents hope.

For the past three decades,

hackers have done a lot of things,

but they have also impacted civil liberties,

innovation and Internet freedom,

so I think it's time we take a good look

at how we choose to portray them,

because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys,

how can they be the heroes too?

My years in the hacker world

have made me realize

both the problem and the beauty about hackers:

They just can't see something broken in the world

and leave it be.

They are compelled

to either exploit it or try and change it,

and so they find the vulnerable aspects

in our rapidly changing world.

They make us, they force us to fix things

or demand something better,

and I think we need them

to do just that,

because after all, it is not information

that wants to be free, it's us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. (Applause)

Hack the planet!