ULTIMATE BEGINNER HANDBOOK TO COMPUTER HACKING ESSENTIALS: LEARN ETHICAL HACKING, PENETRATION TESTING AND BASIC SECURITY: 50+ FREE RESOURCES TO HELP YOU MASTER THE ART OF HACKING (2015)

WHAT IS A HACKER?

ORIGINALLY HACKERS WERE NOT COMPUTER BASED

Hacker literally means to break to your benefit, which means that when you used something in manner that it was originally not intended to be used; you have become a hacker. Originally, when you decided to optimize or make something better by taking it a part and then putting it back together in a more efficient way, sometimes even adding something to make it better, this in it of itself was what it meant to be a hacker. If you took a toaster and changed the quality of the heating coils so that it would take less power but cook faster, you were a hardware hacker. If you chose to wake up early every morning and brushed your teeth while you took a shower, you were a life hacker. If you decided to make a method that allowed you to do work faster, you were a efficiency hacker. You could have literally been a hacker for anything you decided to improve.

SO WHAT IS A HACKER NOW

Hackers are now often associated with computers and while terms like Life Hacker are still popular terminology, a term that directly describes an action, the general meaning of a hacker is within a computer. A hacker is a person who programs, navigates, or develops a method that allows them access into an area that they are not normally allowed to have access inside of. This means that a person who can “view source” and then read the language the website is developed in so that they can manually remove the code that pops up those annoying advertisements is a hacker.

WHY ARE HACKERS IMPORTANT?

Hackers make the world go around in the cyber world and the main cause for improvements in technology in general. Whenever a person is able to gain access they are not supposed to gain access to, the person who runs security must now come up with a new and improved way to protect the company. The same goes for the advertisement and media industry, because people are blocking advertisements and downloading media all of the time. It is so simplistic to download a YouTube video that the music industry focuses heavily on live events for money instead of the actual music album itself. Artists have to put intricate watermarks on their photos in order to ensure that hackers do not just simply download the pictures from the source and sell them. If it were not for hackers, the development of technology would be a lot slower and the world would not benefit.

After all, it’s not just security hackers improve, but technology itself. We will discuss how they do it later, but hackers can download information in mid-process if it is not fast enough and unsecure. This has lead to developing methods that let web browser provide a fast connection to their users and a direct line to not only make it difficult for hackers, but also makes it faster for the consumers of the internet. Not all of the technology improvements are accredited to these hackers, but a good portion of good practices can be and that’s why, as much of a problem hackers are, hackers are actually beneficial to the internet.