While most people are familiar with hacking and the risks of leaving a laptop, network, or database unprotected and vulnerable to digital attack, far fewer people are as familiar with hackers themselves. Rarely seen and rarely identified, hackers still have the potential to inflict devastating online damage or in some cases help restructure digital defenses. Yet hackers, like people, come in different sorts. Despite a vast range of hackers’ abilities, motivations, and experiences, here are the 3 primary types of hackers.
White Hats
These are the “good guys” of the digital world. Also known as ethical hackers, white hats detect flaws in systems not in order to exploit them but instead to bolster them. They find the problems in a website, database, or any other hackable system and then inform the systems owners of the breach. In this way, system owners are able to close the gap before an unexpected, costly, and dangerous breach by an unwanted hacker.
White hats function pretty similarly to other hackers—they just hack with different intent. Instead of installing ransomware or crashing a system, they use similar methods to discover how these types of attacks could be done and let system owners know how to close the gaps.
Black Hats
Just like in the Wild West, black hats are the natural counterpoints to white hats and are some pretty lowdown customers.
Using pretty much any exploitative hacking method you can think of, black hats may try to slow your internet down, install ransomware on your computer, steal your passwords (even from legitimate websites), and trick you into clicking on shady phishing emails. And these are just several of the ways that they may try to breach your data.
Black hats are often motivated by money. They may try to access your bank account digitally by stealing the password from a website you entered it on or directing you to an unsafe website. Another way is by use of ransomware: black hats literally take your data hostage until you pay them a ransom (or you outsmart them).
Gray Hats
The morality of the internet, like life, is seldom cut-and-dried, and this is also true of hackers. Gray hats may actually be the largest of the three main hacker categories because hackers are rarely knights with shining keyboards or villains out to watch the world crash, one database at a time.
It might sound like gray hats are like the previous two types of hacker, but they just do some good and some bad hacking. That’s not actually the case.
White hats and black hats are generally more skilled than gray hats in interfering in systems. Gray hats’ actions are often simpler and more irritating than malicious. For example, they may hack and edit a website as a practical joke without trying to crash or seriously harm it. They rarely hack for good, but they also rarely hack to exploit a website for money.
Take Action
Hopefully this blog has helped you become a little more familiar with some of the main types of hackers and has made you more aware of the cyber security threats they pose. If you have any additional questions or are concerned that you have been hacked, then please reach out to J&P PC Solutions. J&P PC Solutions provides high-quality, professional IT support tailored to you and your business. Just call 443.558.5808 or access the contact form here.
Sources:
https://oss.org/featured/3-main-types-of-hackers/
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ethical_hacking/ethical_hacking_overview.htm
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