Hacker

The person engaged in hacking activities is known as a hacker.

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This hacker may alter system or security features to accomplish a goal that differs from the original purpose of the system. Hacking can also refer to non-malicious activities, usually involving unusual or improvised alterations to equipment or processes. Certain corporations employ hackers as part of their support staff.

These legitimate hackers use their skills to find flaws in the company security system, thus preventing identity theft and other computer-related crimes. Home Dictionary Tags Security. Definition - What does Hacking mean? Techopedia explains Hacking Hackers employ a variety of techniques for hacking, including: Could Your Smartphone Be Hacked? What is the difference between security and privacy?

White hats are hackers who work to keep data safe from other hackers by finding system vulnerabilities that can be mitigated. White hats are usually employed by the target system's owner and are typically paid sometimes quite well for their work. Their work is not illegal because it is done with the system owner's consent. Black hats or crackers are hackers with malicious intentions.

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They often steal, exploit, and sell data, and are usually motivated by personal gain. Their work is usually illegal. A cracker is like a black hat hacker, [13] but is specifically someone who is very skilled and tries via hacking to make profits or to benefit, not just to vandalize. Crackers find exploits for system vulnerabilities and often use them to their advantage by either selling the fix to the system owner or selling the exploit to other black hat hackers, who in turn use it to steal information or gain royalties.

Grey hats include those who hack for fun or to troll. They may both fix and exploit vulnerabilities, but usually not for financial gain.

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Even if not malicious, their work can still be illegal, if done without the target system owner's consent, and grey hats are usually associated with black hat hackers. Four primary motives have been proposed as possibilities for why hackers attempt to break into computers and networks. First, there is a criminal financial gain to be had when hacking systems with the specific purpose of stealing credit card numbers or manipulating banking systems. Second, many hackers thrive off of increasing their reputation within the hacker subculture and will leave their handles on websites they defaced or leave some other evidence as proof that they were involved in a specific hack.

Third, corporate espionage allows companies to acquire information on products or services that can be stolen or used as leverage within the marketplace.

And fourth, state-sponsored attacks provide nation states with both wartime and intelligence collection options conducted on, in, or through cyberspace. The main basic difference between programmer subculture and computer security hacker is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system.

According to Raymond, hackers from the programmer subculture usually work openly and use their real name, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases.

The former focus on creating new and improving existing infrastructure especially the software environment they work with , while the latter primarily and strongly emphasize the general act of circumvention of security measures, with the effective use of the knowledge which can be to report and help fixing the security bugs, or exploitation reasons being only rather secondary. The most visible difference in these views was in the design of the MIT hackers' Incompatible Timesharing System , which deliberately did not have any security measures. There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security is also common within the programmer subculture of hackers.

For example, Ken Thompson noted during his Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a backdoor into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the " Trojan horse ". Furthermore, Thompson argued, the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder.

Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from the computer security hackers: The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts.

The programmer subculture of hackers sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work. In special forms, that can even be an expression of playful cleverness. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access exclusively to a home computer and a modem.

However, since the mids, with home computers that could run Unix-like operating systems and with inexpensive internet home access being available for the first time, many people from outside of the academic world started to take part in the programmer subculture of hacking. Since the mids, there are some overlaps in ideas and members with the computer security hacking community. The most prominent case is Robert T. The Jargon File hence calls him "a true hacker who blundered". They commonly refer disparagingly to people in the computer security subculture as crackers and refuse to accept any definition of hacker that encompasses such activities.

The computer security hacking subculture, on the other hand, tends not to distinguish between the two subcultures as harshly, acknowledging that they have much in common including many members, political and social goals, and a love of learning about technology. They restrict the use of the term cracker to their categories of script kiddies and black hat hackers instead. All three subcultures have relations to hardware modifications. In the early days of network hacking, phreaks were building blue boxes and various variants. The programmer subculture of hackers has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as a mysterious 'magic' switch attached to a PDP computer in MIT's AI lab, that when turned off, crashed the computer.

However, all these activities have died out during the s, when the phone network switched to digitally controlled switchboards, causing network hacking to shift to dialing remote computers with modems, when pre-assembled inexpensive home computers were available, and when academic institutions started to give individual mass-produced workstation computers to scientists instead of using a central timesharing system. The only kind of widespread hardware modification nowadays is case modding.

An encounter of the programmer and the computer security hacker subculture occurred at the end of the s, when a group of computer security hackers, sympathizing with the Chaos Computer Club which disclaimed any knowledge in these activities , broke into computers of American military organizations and academic institutions. They sold data from these machines to the Soviet secret service, one of them in order to fund his drug addiction.

The case was solved when Clifford Stoll , a scientist working as a system administrator, found ways to log the attacks and to trace them back with the help of many others. According to Eric S. Raymond, it "nicely illustrates the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Hacker disambiguation.

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