Just like most Middle Age castles, the cyberspace also has its own ghosts. Who are they? Do they have flash and bones, face and ID or at least a code? People used to think that hacker is the black knife which shows out only at night, but they are real people with a certain mindset.
Just like every story, there are good and bad guys. The same goes with hackers as the vector of activity depends on the ultimate purpose, whether the programmer is intended to harm and steal or to figure out and improve the overall system functioning. You’ll need some color to know who is who:
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The ‘White-hat’ gents are concerned with security matters. They are ethic enough and penetrate if they have permission to unravel the weak points of the system. Abundant tests they conduct are meant to develop resistance and hard-to-break codes. Explore-test-fix-protect is the common creed these experts follow.
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The ‘Grey-hat’ gents probably are less ethic than the previous kind but are benign for the digital environment. Greyhats can violate computer security laws and enter the network without any agreements with the owner; however, they are not intended to harm. They seek for imperfections and give the recipe for curing in return of a reward. The curiosity might be the driving motive that makes the grey programmer drill into the system. The tricky thing about them is that they sell the problem solution, but the way they got it remains secret.
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The ‘Black-hat’ hacker is the antipode of ‘white hat’. Both are the vulnerability hunters, but this character is aggressive for the web. The black hat hackers in digital resemble the real-life criminals, although the laptop, software, and complicated codes are the weapon they use. The NASA breaks, national defense warning system hacks, bank system blocking, and the credit cards data stealing, and corporate secrets. All-in-all any data that costs a lot of money are in the crosshairs.
Maybe they get some ineffable satisfaction while playing hide-and-seek with FBI? That’s the moment when geniality meets insanity.
But we can’t say that the dark players are not useful for the entire Internet mechanism, as the purpose of every struggle is to elicit the blind zones and bring something to the best possible version. Especially when it relates to the software advancing.
So, don’t think that hackers are a sort of Order of Knight Templar as in fact they are the programmers who think with codes and don’t burden themselves with moral strictures or laws.
