The Hitchhiker's Guide To Hacking

More and more brands are starting to embrace comedy as a way of trying to get their message across. The anti-virus firm Norton is the latest to do so - they have created a retro looking guide to hacking, the design of which is inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

As any H2G2 fan will know, space is big! There's a lot of room out there for Arthur Dents to roam, unaware of what's going on around them. As is the case on Earth, there are good and bad people, with some of the latter stopping at nothing to get what they want, irrespective of the damage they end up causing.

Douglas Adams' seminal work started life as a radio series, spawning a series of books, a popular TV adaptation and a slightly less successful move onto the big screen. It has had a big impact on the way in which we see the galaxy, never mind space travel and how we might expect to cope when confronted with something or someone we've never seen the like of before...

While the prospect of Earth being destroyed is more unlikely than, say, your home being bulldozed to make way for a bypass, there are a few less significant things which could be irrevocably damaged, such as computer networks. With a blend of cunning, know-how and patience, hackers are now able to render entire networks useless in a matter of hours if they perfect their malware.

The world is full of Internet nasties which can get out of control quickly if they're not stopped in their tracks straight away. As far back as the 1960s, before Adams had even dreamed up baddies like The Vogons, hackers have been perfecting their art, using everything from floppy disks and USB flash drives to botnets and booby traps in order to get what they want.

However, hackers have had motives besides money to do what they do. In the case of Gary McKinnon, an autistic hacker from Scotland, he managed to access files belonging to the US Military and NASA to try and see if they had any recorded UFO activity.

McKinnon wanted to see if there was life outside this big blue watery sphere, but ended up disappointed. Unless Zaphod Beeblebrox's subjects are rather good at hiding, maybe there's not that much apart from money to be gained from doing a little hacking after all.