Discussion: Hacker Profile

"Hack"

Scott Vinger

How has the perception of the hacker changed over recent years? What is the profile of a hacker today?

We can look at the time line of the word “Hack”

June 1959 – Peter R. Samson of the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT Publishes “AN ABRIDGED DICTIONARY of the TMRC LANGUAGE.” It contains the first verifiable modern source of the word hacker.

November 20, 1963 – MIT’s newspaper, The Tech, publishes the first documented use of hacker in journalism.

September 5, 1977 – Time Magazine publishes the first documented use of “hacker” in the mainstream press.

August 1, 1980 – Psychology Today publishes “The Hacker Papers”

May 6, 1981 – Possibly the first surviving, documented USENET post of the word hacker.

July 2, 1981 – The first documented use in a newspaper of the word hacker.

December 4, 1984 – The word hacker is documented to be spoken for the first time on television, by Ted Koppel.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of hacker is:

1. One that hacks

2. A person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity

3. An expert at programming and solving problems with a computer

4. A person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

So, lets look at Definition # 3 and #4. There are Three Types of Hackers:

1. White Hat Hacker

a. Is an Ethical computer hacker, or a computer security expert, who specializes in penetration testing and in other testing methodologies that ensures the security of an organization’s information systems.

b. Ethical hacking is an increasingly accepted and legitimate profession. Therefore, be careful not to treat an ethical hacker like a former (or current) criminal. 

c. While the nature of their duties is historically “bad,” that doesn’t warrant a set of guidelines separate from their coworkers.

d. Doing so makes an already traditionally solitary role even more isolating and could make them feel like they are doing something wrong when they are actually helping your business.

2. Grey Hat Hacker

a. A computer hacker or computer security expert who may sometimes violate laws or typical ethical standards, but does not have the malicious intent typical of a black hat hacker.

b. Gray Hats frequently hack systems without approval or authorization from a principal enterprise, usually to prove they can, but then usually notify the system or network owner or vendor of any discovered weakness.

3. Black Hat Hacker

a. A person who attempts to find computer security vulnerabilities and exploit them for personal financial gain or other malicious reasons. 

b. They can inflict major damage on both individual computer users and large organizations by stealing personal financial information, compromising the security of major systems, or shutting down or altering the function of websites and networks.

c. The growth of the black hat community simply as a byproduct of a growing society; as any society grows past a certain limit, a dark side emerges. 

d. Black hat hackers range from the mildly irritating to the genuinely malicious.

e. A common tenet to all black hats that ties them together is that they knowingly commit whatever mischief or malice with the full intent of committing such acts.

Hackers

Marlowe Rooks

The interested thing is how we all look at hackers of being an antisocial person sitting in his or her mother basement with nothing but time on their hand to do harm to the world. That is just one of the stereotypes we have of them, but there are some good hackers out there. The frequency of cyberattacks are at a high, so companies and government agencies are realizing that to protect themselves in the network they need creative individuals on their team. So “how does one distinguish between the good hackers who bring us the wonders of technological advancement and the evil hackers who steal our credit card numbers? The term cracker was coined to distinguish evil hackers from the good ones (Jon Erickson (2008).” Beyond that, not all hackers are "bad". There is ethical hacking, that is, the process of illegally entering a company's systems, although legally thanks to a contract, to detect vulnerabilities. Inclusion some hackers our not want we think they are due to the stereotype we have of them.

 

Reference:

Jon Erickson (2008). Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Second Edition chapter 1. Retrieved from Skillsoft