Hacking For Dummies (2015)

Hacking - a regime of Technological Intelligence

The human intellect is no less than miracle. The superb and mind blowing use of human intellect can be depicted in different areas and domains of human civilization. This intellect makes human race, the most superior amongst all creatures. Even though the wise humans existed even in the earlier days of human civilization, during the caveman period, but modern man is has exploited his intelligence in a much wider and boarder domain.

Although the areas of development and progress are many, yet the milestone of development pertains to the area of information technology. The spectacular development in this field has literally revolutionized the human corporate and household working. The binary digits, though seemingly tiny, have put up the world in a new area of profess. Along with the World Wide Web and the internet facilities, today’s world is dependent upon clicks of mouse.

Now the corporate world is just interplay of clicks and virtual domains, each business and government enmity now owes hundreds of computers and internet access gadgets, which make the whole system of working. But as there have been both sides to any phenomenon, so the world does information technology has also undergone various certain attention taking trends. One such trend is hacking.

Hacking:

Hacking is an activity of finding and exploiting the weaknesses and loopholes in the personal or corporate computer systems. So hacking can be regarded as a consequence of insecure computer systems.

While the losses incurred through a hacker’s attack may vary according to the type of data being attacked, but the level of knowledge needed for attacking a system is always the same.

The aims and intentions of hacking:

Being a beginner in the domain of hacking, you may think of hacking as some malicious and destructive activity. Although it is true most of the time, yet the intentions and aims of hackers may vary. A hacker may be indulged in the activity of hacking for:

Ø Financial gains

Ø Protest

Ø Challenge

Ø Enjoyment

Ø Destruction

Ø Professional rivalry

Ø Assistance

Looking at the aims and intentions of these hacking activities, you may have noticed that hacking is not all about financial gains or destruction. But sometimes induced or known hacking is practiced for constructive purposes.

Hackers and their groups

A hacker is person who has a passion or duty to trifle and trickle computer systems and electronic gadget. Hackers have extreme knowledge about the working of these systems, so using this knowledge they can see and locate any kind of weakness in the system. They can even investigate better performance parameters for the systems. Some hackers, by using their knowledge about computer systems, induce these systems to perform the functions in a destructive way

Based on the ultimate intention and result of hacking, we can categories these champs into two major categories. These categories have been named with a clear inspiration from old western movie, where a good and pious guy used to wear white hat, whereas the opponent was always an evil guy, with destructive intentions, wearing a black hat.

White Hat hacker

This is the category of good guys. As the name denotes, wearing white hat is an emblem of peace and constructive activity. White hat hackers are not indulged in any destructive or illegal hacking activity. They either perform hacking with the permission of the owner or practice this activity for enhancing their knowledge and studying the computer systems. As they are regarded as good champs so usually you can find theses white hat hackers in the security departments of various governmental and private organization, where their responsibilities pertain to saving the system of the organization from destructive agents.

Black Hat Hackers

This is the category of bad guys. As their hat color denotes they are bad with evil proposes. Black hat hackers utilize the knowledge of commuter systems and securities for malicious and nasty purposes, mostly for individual profits and gains. You may find a black hat hacker behind the bank robberies, steal credit cards stealing and websites defacing. They may be operating for individual purposes or they may have a whole network which is involved in these kinds of malicious activities.

Many of the rival organization, states or agencies may even hire these black hats, in order to defame the opponents or get access to their systems, for attaining sensitive information.

The Hierarchy of the Hackers

Just as the intentions and purposes of the hackers may vary, the levels of expertise also vary tremendously. So it makes a complete hierarchy of the hackers who may be entitled to different expertise and intentions. The hierarchy goes down as follows:

Script kiddies

These are the hackers which you can categories as “wannabe hackers”. They are looked as notorious even in their own community, because they do not have any kind of good reputation, because of their malicious intentions. These are just like followers. They gain access to one or two major tools which are used in hacking and use them for experimenting different hacking practices. So they level of proficiency and knowledge in the j] hacking community is minimum for the script kiddies. They just use hacking code as a script.

Intermediate hackers

Next to the script kiddies, come the intermediate kiddies. They possess a moderate level of knowledge pertain to network systems, computer security and different codes. So as opposed to the script kiddies, they may know what a script is actually doing to the back of a computer system. So they can make alteration, as opposed to script kiddies, who are induced to blind following. But being at the intermediate level of expertise these hackers use the already developed codes and procedures of hacking. So they select they select some pre developed code of the hacker according to the purpose or intention and use it for gaining the benefit

Elite Hackers

Amongst the community of hackers, these are the elite members. As in a population elite class possesses all the resources and facilities, so elite hackers possess all the knowledge and expertise at the highest level. But reaching this level is not easier. The hackers struggle and strive a lot to reach to the level of these hackers. They can write the codes and paths for reaching and breaking the security barriers. They can alter and modify the hacking activity as and when need, therefore they possess the highest level of expertise in the hacker’s community. They even hack the systems without leaving any foot prints of their presence.