What is Hacking? Types of Hackers

What is Hacking?

Hacking is finding or identifying weakness in a computer network or a system, exploiting on the basis of that weakness and gaining an unauthorized access to and/or control over the system.

Nowadays computers are obligatory. It dosen’t matter if you have a business or if you are a person doing 10 to 5 job or if you are a student, you will see that computers are everywhere and are useful in your daily work.

Think of a morning when you weak up, get ready and go to work. You reach at your work place and go straight to your cubicle to complete your yesterdays work which you left of completing today. But when you turn on your computer to start your work, you see a dialog box showing system data is encrypted. And pay given amount to decrypt data.

This kind of dialog is what you will see when your system gets hacked.

This is an example of ransomware attack.

This year in May (2017), a cyber attack raised by a cryptoworm called WannaCry Ransomware targeted Windows OS by encrypting data on the system.

Types of Hackers?

Hacker is a person who finds weakness in the system to exploits and gain access to it.

Different types of hacker are:

White Hat

A hacker are Ethical hackers who gain access to fix weakness in the system. They are called penetration testers. White hat hacking is not illegal. There are jobs available for these hackers to test the system for any weakness.

Black Hat

Black hat hackers are those who hack the system to gain unauthorized access to the system and can steal or destroy the data. These type of hackers are illegal and are called crackers.

Gray Hat

Gray hat hackers are those who are considered as half black hat and half white hat. They hack the system without permission, find the weakness in the system and then tell the owner about it. They do not hack to harm the system but do it without permission.

Neophyte

Neophyte are those who are new to hacking and may have some or no knowledge about hacking. They are sometimes called Green Hat hackers.

Script Kiddies

Script kiddies are those who have very less knowledge and are considered non-skilled. They do not care much about how they hack. They use tools which are made by some other person for hacking.

Hacktivist

Hacktivist are those who hack to send a public message on social political or religious topics. This involves hacking website and leaving a message on it. This is also done by Denial-Of-Service (DOS) attack.

So, these are the types of hackers.

Now, the question arises, how can anyone protect the data on there system from hackers, especially which are not good.

So, there are some things which you need to follow and take care of. They are below:

• You should use a Antivirus software and that to which gives you total protection.
• You must not open any unknown file (executable file).
• You should not use cracked software's.
• You should scan your PC and other devices, such as pen drive or external drive, as you connect it to your computer.
• You should not download any random file from Internet and also avoid visiting any anonymous or non secure website in the first place.
• Frequently backup of your data. This is the best thing to do before something goes wrong.

So these are some of the things which you should take care of if you want to make sure that your data is safe.