Monday, April 1, 2019

Types of Hackers

Types of Hackers

You must have heard it all over the news major company hacked, user data exposed, hospital held ransom, celebrity tweet something offensive claims hackers did it. Internet superstar linus hacked. Will it never end? Well, no after all for as long as there have been locked pics to break into them and unfortunately to the chagrin of major corporations and individual users alike computers are no different. So, who are these digital lock pickers and what makes them tick. You might think of 90's retro teens with glasses staring at screens flooded with code but the reality is actually far less dramatic.

At the beginning of the digital age, hackers were enthusiast i.e. probing to see what was possible with emerging technologies. Phone freaker's are an early example from the late 1950s through the early 70s. Among whom was the legendary Steve Wozniak who would go on to co-found Apple Computer. Anyway the idea behind freaking was to generate tones that early automated phone systems used in order to gain control for themselves. Woz and Steve Jobs even impersonated Henry Kissinger to prank call the Vatican. Sadly, that era of playful innocence ended soon after computers and networks became more commonplace. And today we classify individual hackers by the hats that they wear which we assign based on their intentions. The colors are

· White

· Gray

· Black

No relation to red hat which is an Enterprise Linux distribution. White hats are mainly security researchers and penetration testers people whose job it is to counter the other guys. Their actions are often sanctioned by the companies who pay them for their services. Some white hats have discovered a massive security holes that could have affected a lot of people if they weren't found. Such as Dan Kaminsky, who discovered a flaw in the DNS that could have crippled huge parts of the Internet. As well as rootkits that Sony was intentionally putting on to its music CDs which you can learn more about here.

Gray hats, as the name suggests muddy the waters. Since they generally don't have malicious intentions but they act without permission from their targets and the way in which they use any data they access comes down to their personal moral code. Gray hat incidents can take many forms from the hacker who sold an iphone cracked to the FBI to help them access the San Bernardino shooters data to the Russian software company that developed eBook software that bypass DRM restrictions. Although that was legal in Russia it wasn't in the U.S. leading to a run with the law when one of their employees visited the state's.

Black hats meanwhile are usually the ones making splashy headlines as they have no problem floating the law to profit at someone else's expense or even to just cause damage to a website service, business or even an individual. When passwords or credit cards are stolen and put up for sale online that's a Blackhat handiwork and although it's easy to label hackers that steal money from target customers as black hats. There's debate as to whether other kinds of hackers fall into this category, think so-called hactivists whose actions inspire impassioned arguments or government spy agencies like the NSA. And some black hats have even had their talents recognized by major IT and cybersecurity firms who have ended up offering them jobs. As long as, the hacker trades in his or her black hat for a white one. But these days it should be noted there are much better ways to break into the world of security consulting than