Computer sabotage is the physical destruction of computer hardware or firmware, or the tamper-ing or erasure of information stored on a computer. The point of sabotage may be to force a competitor out of business, or, as is sometimes done with ar-son, to get the insurance money. Computer hacking has only limited involvement with sabotage, since it is the goal of most hackers to keep computers se-cure, not to destroy them. Still, sometimes sabotage does creep into hacking in limited ways. Reverse social engineering uses what is called sabotage, but it is actually just a bit of tomfoolery used to get a computer to temporarily misbehave. You will read about reverse social engineering later on.
Computer vandals frequently sabotage the in-formation stored on computers after first using hacker's methods to gain entry to them. Vandals should not be confused with hackers, however.
Neither should those folks who introduce incorrect or misleading data into a computer system, or oth-erwise sabotage the data stored therein. An illus-tration of such data tampering is given by Thomas Whiteside in his book Computer Capers (Crowell, 1978). Between 1968 and 1972 the FBI planted false adverse information
on radicals and other people who had wild political views into the computers of credit reporting agencies, "the idea being to harass those citizens by making it difficult, if not im-possible, for them to obtain loans or other forms of credit." For all we know various agencies may be continuing this practice. Want your own file
verified for accuracy? Hacker to the rescue!
