Now, like other tech staffers around the world, she s even more wary than before. Digital break-in stories come in many forms. Anton Karpov, a network administrator at Visual Circuits, a Minneapolis company that designs and makes digital video computer components and software, offers one of the simplest and most common. They ll say, My name is James Smith. I m your new network administrator and I need to clean up files, so I need your password, Karpov explains, noting that the ploy often works.
People give away their passwords and user names.
Then the hacker can do whatever he needs to do on the company servers. It s not always that simple, but it s often that devious. For starters, digital perpetrators aren t usually cyberpunks with political agendas. They re often kids aged 14 to 25, some incompetent and some whip-smart. I fell into hacking from wanting to get free stuff, Jacobs recalls.