Wait, I thought white hat hackers are the guys that corporations and stuff hire to test their security to make sure it’s safe. Are there just vigilante hackers who go around getting into people’s wifis and leaving a note in their email, “I wuz here,”?
(I know there’s Defcon or whatever where everyone is trying to hack but I think going there is kind of opting in to the whole deal.)
Its sorta like protection money. The white hats will break into computer networks and then let them know how to protect themselves for a fee.
As for vigilante hackers on personal internet accounts, I do hear of some that hijack a computer and then tell who owns it that they can pay up and get back their stuff, I cant say for certain that they are the same that way (white/black hat).
Declan
Well, what do most people consider Anonymous to be? I support their dislike of Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church(or The Cult of the Hateful God, as I call them), and they favor transparency and are naturally anti-authortarian. But are they bad or good?
I will concede the OP might have a good idea for a new Law and Order spin-off:
“In the world of computer hacking, there are 2 types of hackers, the White Hats, who hack criminals and terrorist networks, then there are the Black Hats, who are part of something called the AntiSec movement, which favors complete and total transparency of government, and hack government and corporate networks. These are their stories.” dun dun
Hatred originating from disreputable gentlemen is going to continually persist, Little Nemo.
No, I believe the distinction is between hackers, who actually toy with things and try to create novel techniques, and stuff like script kiddies who just use other hacker’s work to exploit people.
If all you had to do was download a program, type a location, and click go, then you aren’t a hacker. The majority of people who cause problems aren’t hackers themselves.
(However, the bigger, more visible stuff is almost always by a hacker.)
Golf clap.
(And knowing Dick Wolf’s spin-off diarrheas, not an unlikely project)
Don’t overreach. Hatred is reserved for people like Hitler or bin Laden. They actually did things worth being hated for.
A hacker - even a genuine one who’s done something more significant than announcing he considers himself a hacker on a message board - is no more than an annoyance.
Probably, but I haven’t given up yet. I just can’t stand to compliment the ignorant monkeys with a button by calling them “hackers”.
Among actual hackers, the word “hacker” means someone who is very good at getting a computer system to do something it wasn’t designed to do. A moment’s thought should reveal that, by this definition, anyone who has ever made any significant progress in computer technology was a hacker, since whatever it was they were doing, it was something computers weren’t designed to do before.
Now, compromising security can qualify: A security system certainly isn’t designed to have people compromise it. But most people who compromise security systems don’t actually have a clue what they’re doing: They’re just pushing buttons on tools made by someone else. They are, in fact, using those tools for exactly what they were designed for. And so, since they’re only using things for what they were designed for, and not innovating anything new, they’re not hackers.