Watching the typical popular media portrayal of a hacker you are likely to see a socially awkward goofy individual either working in some dark basement or high tech office with six 42" LCD screens linked together into one large screen with Matrix like code flowing across the screen as they furiously type away as they get ready to launch some world ending computer virus. Reading or watching the news is likely to be a similar fair with news of a new banking Trojan or hacker group that have stolen millions of bank account records, social security numbers, and the like. On the surface level, hackers are all really bad people that should be locked up, so why learn how to hack?
The truth is there are many different types of hackers, some of which are very important to the health and integrity of private and corporate networks.
According to the EC-Council's Certified Ethical Hacking 9 certification hackers can be classified into 8 categories:
Black Hats: Individuals with extraordinary computing skills, resorting to malicious or destructive activities. These people are also known as crackers.
White Hats: Individuals who profess hacking skills and use them for defensive purposes. They are also known as security analysts.
Grey Hats: Individuals who work both offensively and defensively at various times.
Suicide Hackers: Individuals whose goal(s) are to bring down a critical infrastructure for a "cause". These individuals are not worried about jail time or other forms of punishment.
Script Kiddies: These are unskilled hackers who compromise systems by running scripting tools and software that are created by real hackers.
Cyber Terrorists: Individuals with a wide range of skills. These individuals are motivated by religious or political beliefs to create fear by large scale disruption of computer networks.
State Sponsored Hackers: individuals who are employed by the government to perpetrate and gain top- secret information and to damage information systems of other governments.
Hacktivist: Individuals who promote a particular political agenda by hacking. Especially by defacing or disabling websites.
As you can see, hackers are not so easily defined as a individual thing, nor are they inherently "evil" in nature. In this book we will be focusing on ethical hacking (you can learn about unethical hacking in just about any number of news stories on a daily basis now). The type of hackers that help protect people's networks, ensure network security, finds and fixes flaws to help keep people safe. Hackers are normally curious individuals, who like to see how things work, how to put various systems and security to the test, to think outside of the box and see things in a new way. As with all information and skills it can be used for good or bad.
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