A hacker is someone who can make a computer do what he wants whether the computer wants to or not.

A few years ago I also believed this and thought of hacking as bad and every hacker a computer criminal. At first, “hacker” was a positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could push programs beyond what they were designed to do. Later it became associated with computer vandals intent on harming systems and this is where it stands today.

The word “Hacker” is subject to a long standing definition controversy.

Types of Hackers

1) Hobbyist Hackers – They are people who hack for fun and they make computer’s do new stuff. They do not want loss or destruction of information. They use hardware and software (programming language’s) to do their work.

Acc. to Wikipedia ”Hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software or electronic hardware, either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.”

An excellent example of hobbyist hacking was the “Blue Box”, it was created by the Co-founder of Apple Inc. – Steve Wozniak. The Blue Box was a small electronic device which could place free long distance phone calls. Blue Box led to the term “Phreaking” which is Phone + Freak. They were primarily used by pranksters while others used it solely to make free phone calls.

In the computing community, the primary meaning of hacker is a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. (For example, “Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is considered by some to be a hacker.”)

2) Computer Security Hackers – They are people who work with security side of the computers. It might be securing up the computers/networks or breaking into them.

So computer security hackers can be distinguished by the way in which they use their extra-ordinary computing skills.

White Hats : White Hat hackers are the good guys who use their hacking skills to protect computers/networks. A lot of demand for these hackers, companies pay them high salaries for securing their systems and networks from getting hacked.

Black Hats : Black Hat hackers are the bad guys in the game. They want to intrude security and make money. They take down networks and install backdoors. They use hacking for criminal purposes.

Grey Hats : Grey Hat hackers work for offensive and defensive purpose depending on the situations. They are hired by people to intrude and protect systems. They can be hired for any type of hacking.

Hactivists : Hactivists aka cyberpatriots hack to bring out a social change. They hack government and organizations to announce social, ideological, religious, or political message’s. Hackers fighting between countries are hacktivists. Like hackers of india and pakistan have been fighting for a long time, one side hacks the other sides website’s.

Script Kiddies : A Script Kiddie is a person who boasts breaking systems using scripts and codes which are written by other hackers. They hardly know what the code does. They engage into easier techniques of hacking as phishing and using exploits.

Conclusion :

So hackers can be good or bad people using their extra-ordinary computing skills for good, evil, business or just plain simple fun.

In Cyberspace battles are fought in nanoseconds, Cyber attacks can be on a large scale(ddos) or may be discrete like the enemy has entered your system and manipulated your data and may have installed a backdoor, you come to know about it later. Sometimes the enemy hits you so bad that you become defenseless and are forced to surrender so precautions are necessary. Attacks can be made on Military as well as private networks, the target could be a Defense system or Air traffic control or may be a Power grid.

Governments all over the world are training cyber warriors and preparing them for the cyberwar. We all know about the US govt.’s hack attack’s along side the ground operations during Iraq war and the Russian cyber attacks on Estonia.

President Obama issued a cyber security plan to deal with cyber threats to the nation. Many developed and developing countries have recognized the power of the internet and are now securing their systems against security threats. US, UK, Russia, France, China, North Korea, Canada, Germany are reported to have been securing their systems. Analysts and former intelligence officials, say that China and Russia top the list of countries with highly developed cyberwarfare capabilities. They also named Iran and North Korea as countries with known cyber warfare aspirations.

In 2007 McAfee’s annual report stated that about 120 countries are trying to use the internet as a weapon to target their enemy nation’s financial market’s, Govt computer system’s.

Cyber Terrorism is a rising threat now. Intelligence has reported that there is a discrete threat that terrorist groups like ‘Al-Qaeda’ may plan to launch cyber attacks but currently they don’t have the infrastructure and expertise that may do more damage than guns and bullets. Terrorists can get ‘hired guns’ with the resource’s and motives they have. Terrorist’s main aim will be to make a chaos rather than destruction like terrorist may hack a bank and manipulate some accounts data, people will think they lost all their savings which will create a lot of ruckus.

Cyber Terrorism

You must have read about the iranians hacking into the US drones with a 25.95 $ software and viewing their live feed, this can be pretty dangerous to US security. The lame engineers who made the predator drones didnt even encrypt the data huh.. Iranian hackers recently hacked twitter by compromising with some DNS stuff and Google Morroco was also hacked by Pakbugs (Pakistani Hackers).

This is exactly why a great number of non-partisan computer security experts are warning of the danger of Internet voting. Basically, they say that there is no way to secure Internet voting. Yet, there is a move to make that happen in the U.S. First, the overseas military, next the overseas ex-pats, and finally the rest of us. And, we never saw it coming. If and when it becomes the method we use to cast our votes, we will have given up our democracy.