Introduction to Hacking

There are various definitions one can get to know about hackers. The term hacker was used in the early 1990s and it was to describe someone who could be a great programmer and had the ability to solve complex problems. Now the definition of the hacker changed from time to time as it started to gain a negative vibe by the media. 

The media started to refer to this hacker as someone who finds loopholes and tries to gain access into the system to steal information that could be important for the victims. This was the picture created by the media to only show the negative aspect, but they didn’t show the positive aspect. The positive aspect was someone who was exposing the vulnerabilities found in the system and protecting organizations and multiple users. 

In short, we can define a hacker as someone who is able to be creative, solve problems that can be complex, and more. Due to this reason, the term has been broken into three different categories :

1. White Hat Hacker –
   They are the hackers referred to as security professionals. This type of hacker is employed by organizations, and they are permitted to attack an organization. They can attack the organization because their main job is to find the vulnerabilities which can be used by the attacker.
2. Black Hat Hacker –
   They are one type of hackers who uses the knowledge for malicious purposes. They are someone whom we can call a cracker. The way they use the knowledge is to gain access to the information of the user which might be dangerous for the victims. 
3. Grey Hat Hacker –
   They are the type of hacker who acts as both the white Hat Hacker and the Black Hat Hacker. For example:- A grey hat hacker can work as a security profession for any organization and finds the vulnerabilities that still exist in the system. But they can leave a backdoor, by which they can access and can sell confidential information to the competitors of a company. 

Now we also have different categories of hackers whom we have heard sometimes. So let’s learn all of them one by one :

1. Script Kiddie – 
   They are someone who doesn’t have the experience or lack knowledge.  The experience or the knowledge they lack is how an exploit works. They mostly rely on those exploits which are already created by someone. They are someone who can compromise the target, but they can’t modify or debug the exploit if it does not work. 
2. Elite Hacker – 
   They are someone who has efficient knowledge of how the exploit takes place, or they can create exploits. They are someone who can also modify the codes that someone else has written. In short, we can say that they have skills that are elite. 
3. Ethical Hacker –
   Ethical hackers are those who are hired and are given permission to attack the system. They can attack the system just to expose the vulnerabilities, that an attacker can take advantage of. 
4. Hacktivists – 
   They are actually a group of hackers. They usually hack into the computer systems because they have some reason, or they have some purpose. Now the purpose can be of anything like freedom of speech and so on.