Female and Male Hacker Conferences Attendees: Their Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Scores and Self-Reported Adulthood Experiences

Female and Male Hacker Conferences Attendees: Their Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Scores and Self-Reported Adulthood Experiences

Bernadette H. Schell (University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada) and June Melnychuk (University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-805-6.ch008
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Abstract

To date, studies on those in the Computer Underground have tended to focus not on aspects of hackers’ life experiences but on the skills needed to hack, the differences and similarities between insider and outsider crackers, and the differences in motivation for hacking. Little is known about the personality traits of the White Hat hackers, as compared to the Black Hat hackers. This chapter focuses on hacker conference attendees’ self-reported Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) predispositions. It also focuses on their self-reports about whether they believe their somewhat odd thinking and behaving patterns—at least as others in the mainstream society view them—help them to be successful in their chosen field of endeavor.
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Concerns Over Botnets And Viruses And Their Developers

A “bot,” short form for robot, is a remote-controlled software program acting as an agent for a user (Schell & Martin, 2006). The reason that botnets are anxiety-producing to organizations and governments is that mal-inclined bots can download malicious binary code intended to compromise the host machine by turning it into a “zombie.” A collection of zombies is called a “botnet.’

Since 2002, botnets have become a growing problem. While they have been used for phishing and spam, the present-day threat is that if several botnets form a gang, they could threaten—if not cripple--the networked critical infrastructures of most countries with a series of coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (Sockel & Falk, 2009).

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