Hacking: The good side!

Hacking, Hacker and Hacked, these are some words which bring up in our mind of some bad guys hacking into some computer system(s) without any authority and with some bad intentions. Often in movies or television serials a star shows up an image of a young IT geek who types few commands and hacks some computer system device. But in reality, an IT security geek acts as an ethical hacker, the one who is also known as White Hat hacker, and he attacks on security systems of some organization on behalf of its owners to find out the loopholes so that the same can be plugged in order to make the security more and highly effective. But on the other side there are also some IT security geeks who access computer system(s) without any permission to destroy data or make the system unusable for authorized users. The types of IT geeks are known as Crackers (Black Hat hacker), not Hackers. There are other types of hackers too such as Gray Hat Hackers and Suicide Hackers.

There are four basic kinds of hacks:

IP Hack: It refers to a scenario of hiring someone to hack a specific IP address, giving them little or no information in advance.

Application Hack: A much more sophisticated hack that can dig deep into databases and down production servers. Only experienced hackers, with stringent rules leading their actions, should be allowed to perform such hacks. One should never hire a black hat hacker for this type of hack.

Physical Infrastructure Hack: This is where people try to get into our services to access our systems looking for confidential information such as passwords.

Wireless Hack: War-driving is the term used to describe this type of hack where WAP’s are exploited from the back of a van. Ethical hackers do the same thing, but report their findings back to you instead of stealing your passwords.

Let us now take a look at some examples showing positive side of Hacking.

Social good- Random Hacks of Kindness, a joint initiative by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank stresses upon problem solving, particularly to bring together the experts around disaster management and crisis response. Through events featuring “apps competitions,” “hackathons” and “technology for social good,” the group has planned solutions for a variety of issues such as tracking broken wheelchair lifts in public transportation; tracking cell phone and Wi-Fi signal strengths in areas with damaged infrastructure in disaster scenarios; and mapping incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt to identify “safe zones” where there are few reports. 

The Hacking field is expanding with the rising pay scales and more and more security related positions opening up some of which are:

-Security Fundamentals

-Ethical Hacking

-Penetration Testing

-Computer Forensics

-Disaster Recovery

-Secure Programming

Back in March this year, a guy named Mike Mika did a very cute thing just to make his daughter happy. He hacked the Donkey Kong game so his little 3 year old daughter can play as a female character and save Mario instead of Mario saving the princess. Everything in the world has its good side as well as bad side, and hacking is not an exception.  There is no way for us to stop crackers doing bad things, but as a future computer scientists, we can always choose to stand on the good side.

References:

http://www.frenchtribune.com/teneur/1316637-hacking-not-always-bad

http://www.secpoint.com/types-of-hacker.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(computer_security)