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