White Hat Computer Hacking

Opinion

Hackers are dangerous and the cause of one of the worst things in America, identity theft. A hacker could destroy lives.

Opinion

Hackers have developed an array of levels of hacking ranging from good hackers to bad hackers. However, a hacker historically is one who searches out and exploits weaknesses in computer systems in order to gain unauthorized access. Some do this simply because they can and breaking into a system is a source of pride for most. Computer hackers typically steal and damage property that doesn't belong to them. Placing all labels and semantics aside, in a civilized society governed by laws that protect its citizens, people who steal are considered "bad" as they should be. Hackers are modern day pirates.

Hacking is basically the vast knowledge of computers or any particular thing. For a computer hacker you should have vast knowledge of computer or in other words you must know everything about everything.

There are different types of hackers and the work they do depends on their category.

Ethical Hacker or White Hat Hackers do only ethical hacking like securing computers from malicious viruses and activity. They trace the path of the virus and other things.

Black Hat Hackers do only non ethical things or malicious things for harming the computer like hacking email accounts, sending Trojans, stealing, and lots of illegal things related to computers.

Yes the hacker can hack a lot of things.

peoples account,video games,coins,gold,etc

as if you know hackers are really smart especially those hackers who make their own program some hackers hack for good things. some hackers hacks for revenge wich is kind of good or bad. why does hackers hack video games?

its because they want to buy stuff they REALLY want so they learn how to hack and make theyre own program to hack coins and then buy the stuff they love.

For all intents and purposes, there are indeed good and bad hackers when considering all the modern definitions of hackers, but the answer one would get to this question depends on whom you ask. In general, there are four categories of hackers. Each category attempts to generally convey the moral compass of that group relative to themselves and everyone else, as well as provide a basic backdrop of information on that category.

The first category of hackers are those for whom the term 'hacking' was originally defined. In this category, you have the hackers that perform the art in order to improve their knowledge of technology. They are curious about how systems work, and all of their attempts at penetration and exploits are merely expressions of this curiosity. Any damage caused is coincidental, or, if intentional, is based on revenge and not simple exploitation of innocent bystanders. Hackers were often classified by types, such as hardware hackers, computer hackers, phone hackers, etc.

In general, this category of hackers will not acknowledge the remaining three types of hackers as such. They consider the second form of hackers to be 'crackers', the third form as 'security consultants', and the fourth form as 'criminals.' This category only recognizes the classic definition of hacking, and so all hacking is good. Most everyone else, except possibly whitehats, are likely to see this category as bad due to the negative media coverage of crackers.

The second category of hackers were called crackers at large, until the media had a confusion over the various terms and simply lumped anyone that did something unusual with technology as hackers, mutating the term. Crackers are those that generally 'crack' things, such as breaking through firewalls, reverse engineering copyright protection so they can sell illegal copies, and the like; they have the same basic skills as hackers, but have a darker side to their motives.

Classic hackers generally hated the media for smearing their reputation by lumping in these malicious individuals with themselves. At some point, crackers also started using the term 'hackers' for themselves, thus further cementing the definition of hacker as 'one who does bad things with computers.' These crackers see themselves as good, or at least morally gray, and do not generally see any difference between their activities as compared to classic hackers, but are classified as bad by almost everyone else.

The third category of hackers are called whitehat hackers. Individuals in this category are a branch from the classic hackers on the 'good' side of morality. While classic hackers might say that this new group of hackers sold out on their heritage, whitehat hackers are out to make the world a better place, and line their pockets at the same time. Whitehats generally appeared after the appearance of blackhats; they seem to have appeared from the classic hacker community in response to a threat with the promise of monetary gain for their troubles.

These hackers will penetrate systems, document the flaws, and then sell this information to the organizations they have penetrated. They won't generally do so until they've been contracted by the organization to perform this work, which makes their otherwise illegal activities legal. They are essentially employed hackers for the good of humanity. Classic hackers are likely to see them as bad, having discarded their disdain for corporate greed, and blackhats see them as enemies, while the rest of the world see them as good.

The fourth category of hackers are called blackhat hackers, and represent the other side of the for-profit hacker community. They are generally crackers that have gone to the next level of the art of criminal activity. While crackers might break copyright protections for personal gain, blackhats are more interested in the big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Rather than sell a few lousy DVDs or cracked games, these hackers break into databases and steal millions of credit card numbers, or grab bank account numbers and transfer money out of them covertly, and other such activities.

Blackhats and whitehats are directly opposed to each other, with the good trying to defend companies against the bad. Neither group are generally interested in hackers or crackers, except possibly as recruits for their respective trades. Everyone considers this group bad, except for themselves; since most of them have little sense of morality, they usually simply exist, although some might acknowledge they are bad or have a sense of doing good by claiming that their hacker mentality against corporate greed drove them to relieve those corporations of their money. Blackhats, however, will work together for greater gains from their activities.

As one can tell, 'good' and 'bad' are relative to whom the question is asked, and even their very definitions differ even within the same group and from other groups.

Originally the term referred to people who used a razor blade and/or fingernail clippers to "hack" or roughly cut parts in electronics such as the traces on circuit boards, legs of diodes etc. Police scanners were "hacked" in order to add more memory, remove CPU processors , speed up scanning by "hacking" the crystal oscillator and replacing with faster ones. Thes methods are directly related to why computers now have more RAM, and are faster. Some of the old (and I do mean old) "hackers" devised a system in the 1960s to simultaneously send voice and data over a phone line using frequency phase shifting and filtering. A similar process used later by DSL.

"Hacking" and "Modding" evolved into things such as examining the programming of a thing. Beginning with noticing things such that by pressing certain keys or combinations of keys in certain secquences on a device could produce certain results. Following the era of IBM's "Big Blue" chess tournament, AT&T introduced the "unbeatable Tic Tac Toe Computer, and exhibited it. I, I mean a "hacker" back then, was able to beat the computer with a sequence of key presses in order to "cheat" the computer out of a move. On many Shortwave radios, Police Scanners, even cell phones etc, certain key presses are used in the programming, and could be used to alter that programming.

The keys on a keyboard of a device are a "Matrix" Keyboards use a matrix with the rows and columns made up of wires. Each key acts like a switch. When a key is pressed, a column wire makes contact with a row wire and completes a circuit. The keyboard controller detects this closed circuit and registers it as a key press to the software.

I'm going to try to keep this understandable to readers ...

Software can emulate or act like hardware.

Example: a hardware modem versus a DSP/Digital Signal Processor modem, where a chip is programmed to act like the hardware....

So, later, the focus turned even more from "hacking" the actual electronics and hardware to software "hacking" through PROGRAMMING.

A "black hat" hacker is often referred to as a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems. Although that could be a "cracker" ... a person cracking passwords etc.

Most often people who call themselves "hackers" are called "wannabes" by the old-timers, and nowadays are often adolescents using a program they didn't write, by clicking a button they didn't create, to do what don't understand, in an attempt to disrupt something they don't know how to fix.

"White Hat" hackers are the "good guys" like ... Like the old-timers who vastly improved what computers are capable of doing, and the ones currently trying to improve security by locating and preventing weaknesses.

This Answer is dedicated to the memory of Bill Cheek, author, The Scanner Modification Handbook series, and his BBS and Fidonet terminal (prior to "The Internet") Good man, Good freind to many... May he R.I.P.

According to the EC-Council's Certified Ethical Hacker course documentation the two can be defined as follows; Penetration Testing:

A goal-oriented project of which the goal is the trophy and includes gaining privileged access by pre-conditional means.Ethical Hacking:

A penetration test of which the goal is to discover trophies throughout the network within the predetermined project time limit. For me reading that I would say difference is; a pen-test has a single goal (trophy) and strict procedures that have to be followed to get that trophy, and an ethical hack is a much larger beast that involves many goals or trophies, could last so long it needs to be time restricted, and in general has less limits. So a pen-test is "one goal, one process" and ethical hacking is "hack everything that can be hacked... ...ethically"