you've heard it all over the news "major company hacked, user data exposed, the hospital held to ransom, celebrity tweet something offensive and claims hackers did it " will it never end? well, no after all for as long as there have been locks there have been locked pics to break into them and unfortunately to the chagrin of major corporation and individual users alike computers are no different. so, who are these digital lock picker and what makes them tick you, might think of QoS retro teens with glasses staring at screen flooded with codes. but the reality is actually far less dramatic.
At the beginning of the digital age, hackers were enthusiasts probing to see what was possible with emerging technologies, phone phreakers 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 freacking was to generate tones that early auto mates phones systems used in order to gain control for themselves Woz and Steve Jobs even impersonated Henry kissinger to prank call the vacation, sadly that era of playful innocence ended, soon after computers and networks became more commonplace. Today we classify individualy hackers by the hats that they wear which we assign based on their intentions. the colors are white, grey or black.
white hats are mainly security researchers and penetration testers. people whose job it is to counter the other guys. their actions are offer sanctioned by the companies who pay them for their services. some white hats have discovered a massive security that could have affected a lot if they weren't found such as Dam Kamisky who discovered a flaw in the DNS that could have crippled huge parts of the internet as well rootkits that sony was intentionally putting on its music CDs.
Grey hats as the name suggest muddy the waters. since they generally don't 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 hackers who sold and iPhone cracked to the FBI to help them access to the Russian software company that developed ebook software that bypasses DRM restrictions although that was legal in Russia but wasn't in The leading to a run with the law when one of their employees visited the state's.
Black hats meanwhile are usually the one making splashy headings as they have no problems 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 black hat handiwork and although it's easy to label hackers that steal money from target customers as black hats there's a debate as to whether other kinds of hackers fall into this category think so-called HACKTIVISTS whose actions inspire impassioned arguments or government spy agencies like the NSA and some black hats recognized major IT and cyber security firms who have ended up offer them jobs as long the hacker trades in his or her black hat for white one but these days it should be noted there are much better ways to break in to the world of security consulting than by committing crimes.
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