Types of hacking

Ethical hacking

With the growth of the internet, computer security has become a major concern for business and governments. They want to be able to take advantages of the internet for electronics commerce, advertising, information distribution and access, and other pursuits, but they are worried about the possibilities of being “hacked”. At the same time, the potential customers of these services are worried about making control of personal information that varies from credit card numbers to social security numbers and home addresses.

In their search for a way to approach the problem, organization came to realize that one of the best ways to evaluate the intruder threat to their interests would be have to have independent computer security professionals attempt to break into their computer system. This scheme is similar to having independent to break into an organization to verify its bookkeeping records. In the case of computer security, these “tiger teams” or “ethical hacker” would employ the same tools and techniques as the intruders, but they would neither damage the target systems nor steal information. Instead, they would neither damage the target systems nor steal information. Instead, they would evaluate the target systems’ security and report back to the owner with the vulnerabilities they found and instruction for how to remedy them.

 Ethical hacking is also called a white hat hacking. It is a purposefully seeking out vulnerabilities that a criminal or malicious hacker could exploit. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretches their capabilities and one who is capable of creative overcoming or circumventing  limitation is known as Ethical Hacker.

Ethical hacker learns their skills many different ways, such as self-taught trough books, attended either in person or via the Internet (distant learning), or plain, old-fashioned trial-and-error. Many of these Ethical Hacker are reformed, to former Crackers. They learned their skills and gained their abilities the same way as the current Crackers.

Criminal Hacking

Criminal Hacking on the other hand, is seeking out vulnerabilities in information systems that can exploited for malicious or criminal purposes. Criminal hacking is also known as Black hat hacking or Cracking. Criminal hacking can result in loss of system availability, loss of data, loss of customer’s identities, and possibly loss of customers.

Criminal hacker installed special slave or zombie programs or poorly secured computer systems. These slave programs were then ordered to attack the main victims using coded communications from criminal hacker controlling them. The slave programs made the computers they were on send out thousands of messages to the victims’ computers, swamping their communication. No one else could get much have response from the computers under attack. Part of the cost of cleaning up the denial-of-services attack came from having to pay employees to search out the slave programs and recover them.

Some criminal hackers claim that if they don’t alter information, they haven’t done anything wrong- or at least, they haven’t done anything really wrong, as they say. This point of view is simply, filthy incorrect. Any unauthorized penetration of a system on which on which people depends destroys the trusted computer base; that is, the user can’t trust the compromised base. Such efforts can take days of exhausting, tedious work. 

Another forms of hacking are obviously wrong; Criminal hackers sometimes take services from mobile companies without paying them. For example, they use special phone numbers called teleconference bridges to talk to each other. The company that rents the bridge end with paying lot of money per minute for those of stolen phone calls. Stealing phone call service is known as phreaking. The shareholders, employees and customers of victimized firms pay for their theft directly or indirectly.

Another game some kids are playing is denial of service. Parents should be aware that their kids may be involved in any kind of amusement that brought down Amazon.com and eBay.com in February 2000: denial-of- services (DoS) attacks. Because hundreds or even thousands of infected computers may be involved in such attacks, cumulative effect can be overwhelming. Some victims are completely off the web or internet during the attacks. For e-commerce sites, such unavailability may be catastrophic.