The tricks hackers use, and what you can do to foil them. With the click of a mouse on one computer, the screen of the laptop a few feet away flashes wildly as a flood of data flies silently across a private network cable connecting the two machines. Within a minute the laptop's file sharing password is compromised. Packets are coming at it so fast, the firewall doesn't know what to do.
Some hackers claim they can teach a monkey how to hack in a couple of hours.
But we also found out that computer users can make a hacker's job much harder by avoiding a few common mistakes. Just as he says this, Optyx uses a program to get the laptop to spew out a bit of data identifying its operating system and version. He then runs the program that cracked the file sharing password in the blink of an eye. We watch as he uses another tool to root through files in the laptop's shared directory. But, save from disconnecting our machine from the network cable, we're powerless to stop it.