When someone says the word Hacker, what is the first thing that pops into most people's heads? Viruses, identity theft, stolen credit card numbers, crashed web sites, or worse. When someone says "hacker" to me I think of the pursuit of knowledge. I know that, already someone reading this will sigh and not pay attention to anything else that I write. This, in my opinion, is directly the fault of the media and the government. Now, before making any judgments, I am not an anarchist and I love my country. When something goes wrong with a computer people think of hackers. Why is this so? When computers started making a major impact on our lives, people realized that there was money to be made in cyber-crime. Being humans we need to label these people. The media got a hold of the term hacker and, not fully knowing what it meant, used it to identify the bad guys.
Yes hackers do break into web servers, write viruses, invade privacy, and generally do "bad" things. Most of the things that hackers do are, in fact, illegal. This is not being written to defend the legality of hacking or the hacker lifestyle, but to explain the reasons for hacking and the usefulness. Why do hackers do what they do? They do it for fun, adrenaline, and mainly to learn. Hackers do not steal credit card numbers, they do not crash web sites or servers (on purpose), and they have no more negative effect on the internet than a thirteen year old writing bad words in his blog. Hackers have a whole other language and in this language there are names for these cyber-havoc causing individuals: Crackers, Lamers, and Script Kiddiez.
Crackers, for the most part, pirate software. They reverse engineer software to find ways around paying for it. Most of them give the information to the cyber community, and some sell the info. Lamers are usually responsible for crashed web sites, viruses, and stolen information. In the hacker world, lamers are basically the ones trying to be "cool." They aren't good enough, nor do they have the mind state to be l33t. l33t is hacker lingo for elite, the top guns of the hacking world. Even lower on the electronic food chain are Script Kiddiez. These are the people that use software and Trojan viruses to "hack" a computer. Script Kiddiez, although they don't know much about hacking, can be the most dangerous. They are dangerous for the simple fact that they don't know what they are doing and they play around in other computers and end up destroying data.
There are different kinds of l33t hackers. Black-Hat, Grey-Hat, and White-Hat. Basically, Black-Hat hackers do the illegal stuff, White-Hat hackers protect against the Black-Hats and Grey-Hats, they do a little of both. White, at work for money, and Black, at home for fun.
What the media doesn't talk about, and therefore what most people don't know, is that ninety percent of the anti-virus, anti-hacker, and anti-spyware software is written by hackers. The operating systems people use are also written by hackers.
In the late seventies, a hacker by the name of Captain Crunch discovered that a toy whistle, which he got out of a box of cereal, emitted the same frequency (2600 MHz) that Pacific Bell used to authorize long distance phone calls. He was later arrested and served prison time. Kevin Mitnick, after a long stretch of credit card fraud, was arrested and served many years in prison. A thirteen year old boy hacked the New York Stock Exchange. Being a minor, he was sentenced to house arrest and is never allowed to access a PC again. Bill Gates, perhaps the most well known hacker ever, helped to create, and then took full credit for the Windows operating system. He is now one of the richest men on the planet.
Before people pass judgment on hackers, they first need to learn all of the facts, and then realize that they are using software, written by hackers, to protect their operating systems (that are written by hackers) against viruses and attacks from lamers, crackers and script kiddiez. Not hackers. Hackers hack to learn and to keep the hacker ethic alive.
Information wants to be free
