This week I'm going to talk about hackers. Not to be confused with when you leave your Facebook logged in and your friend comes and makes an embarrassing post. That's not hacking. Hacking has to do with different inputs to crack a password and access an account, not an account you happened to leave logged in. With the air cleared on that there are different types of hackers. White hat hackers hack for a corporation to make that corporations product is secure. They do penetration testing to make sure other color hats don't break into their system or program. The next color of hat is black hat hackers. Black hat hackers break into systems typically for personal gain. They steal identities, credit cards, etc. to either sell or to create chaos for a company or person. Gray hat hackers are the gray area of hacking. Gray hat hackers will try to compromise a system just to well... test it. They will alert the company of the security programs if they find them usually. However there have been a lot of anger towards gray hat hackers. Companies have started suing them for exposing the security problems instead of thanking them or fixing the breaches. These people are who hack for fun, not for profit by like a white or black hat hacker.
With all of that laid out. There is a convention for hackers called Def-con. Def-con is a hacking convention where companies and hackers and until most recently NSA would attend to show off their latest tools they've developed. One particular tool that was incredibly interesting is a program that listens to wireless traffic. Dependent on the port that information was sent by, the program could determine what each device was on the network. The best part of this program was, no one would know if you were listening. as in your device wouldn't intercept and repeat the signal, it would receive the broadcasted and message without anyone knowing the wiser that it was listening. There has been a worldwide outcry over our government hacking other governments information along with its own citizens information. People cry foul as this would be consider black hat hacking. The government refuses to tell us what they're using the information or gathering it in the first place. It also hurt a lot of big Tech businesses here in America. as mentioned in an aritcile by Cecilia Kang and Ellen Nakashima, "Cisco has said it is already seeing customers, especially those
overseas, back away from U.S.-branded technology after documents
revealed that the NSA enlisted tech firms and also secretly tapped into
their data hubs around the world as the agency pursued terrorism
suspects." After these revelation they were barred from attending Def-con this last year.
There are so many different types of hacking that it may be construed to people only thinking its bad. Hackers Anonymous are always pegged as the bad guys even when they expose corruption in our government. Sometimes hackers are bad, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're the unsung heroes that we need to expose the truth. hacking gives us knowledge and security, if used for the right reasons.
Cecilia Kang and Ellen Nakashima Article:
http://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2013/12/18/Tech-CEOs-to-Obama-NSA-s-hacking-hurt-our-business/stories/201312180059
This is a great post, Jace. I agree that grey hat hackers whose activities fall somewhere between white and black hat hackers in a variety of practices. They usually do not hack for malicious intentions or get disadvantages from people's personal information. However, they sometimes break the rule, and do illegal attack to any target that serve their purpose. Mostly, we cannot easily distinguish them from black and white hat hackers. I guest it depends on what point of view of each person about this type of hackers.
ReplyDeleteIn general, the post is very informative and readable. Keep doing the good work.
Hey Jace,
ReplyDeleteThis is my first time reading your blog, and this post is very interesting. I like how you laid out the conventional names for the different types of hackers, and their motives. I'd heard these names thrown around a lot and I didn't realize exactly what they meant. You mention also that a lot of good can come from hacking, which I totally agree with. Hackers tend to get a bad rap, like in the example of grey hat hackers being sued, even though they've shown critical vulnerabilities in the security of different systems. Your post reads well, the pictures stretch off the margins of the blog, and some links would have been nice. Aside from that, great post!