In the world of cyber crime, hackers have become one of the most feared criminals. Hackers are people who find a weakness in a computer system and exploits it. Motivations for hacking may be for a challenge, to gain a profit or to protest. Hackers were once considered part of the computer underground, but have evolved to the public community.

Hacker

Black hat hacking refers to someone who cracks into computer networks, computers or creates viruses. The term was derived from black and white western movies where the criminals wore the black hats. These computer security hackers are often called crackers. Computer crimes have now been funneled down to a specific term labeled super crimes.

The white hat hackers are the good guys. They are security experts that specialize in testing the penetration of computer information systems. This is also called ethical hacking. If the white hat hacker can penetrate the system, further steps must be taken to secure the network to hopefully prevent the black hats from getting in.

The United States National Security Agency trains and offers white hat hackers certificates for orderly and ethical hacking techniques, along with team management. Who would have ever thought that our government is looking to employ hackers? I imagine that it is better to have the hackers working for us than against us.

A common Malware called the Trojan horse is used by hackers for remote access into computers and networks. Hackers are limited as to what tasks that they can perform set by the computers user privileges. Some of the operations that can be performed are data theft, keystroke logging, watch the users screen, downloading or uploading files and crashing the computer.

As I have mentioned in other blogs, make sure that you have a proactive antivirus program. Reactive programs will allow Malware to get through. Most of the free antivirus solutions are reactive based. I have too much invested into my six computers on my home network to risk having a Trojan horse becoming a doorway for a hacker. This is why I keep my proactive antivirus solution active and up to date.

hackers

hackers

hackers