Games and Simulation: DS Online's Newest Topic Area

Over the past few years, we've all witnessed the hacker community's growing impact on both the IT industry and academia. Host and network exploitation techniques that used to be discussed in "underground" forums are now featured in book series from No Starch Press, Syngress, and other publishers. Furthermore, they've become standard training for security practitioners - see, for example, the SANS Institute's Security 504: Hacker Techniques, Exploits, and Incident Handling course (http://www.sans.org/training/courses.php). It is now beyond doubt that the hacker community has developed efficient techniques for analyzing, reverse engineering, testing, and modifying software and hardware that challenge their college and graduate-school-educated peers. These techniques have let the community substantially contribute to the state of the art of practical computer security. Many academic researchers recognize that marginalizing the hacker community would be a mistake, and increasing numbers of industry and government security practitioners attend hacker conferences such as DefCon (http://www.defcon.org) and Black Hat (http://www.blackhat.com). In fact, the US Military Academy and the US Naval Academy supported their students' participation in computer-security-related competitions at ShmooCon (http://www.shmoocon.org) and DefCon, respectively.