Cybersecurity for Families and Friends — Ethical Hacking and Cracking
The main purpose of this series is to make our families and friends to be comfortable on the internet. In the second episode, we discussed secure websites as the only website where we should be entering our sensitive information. In this third episode we want to make some popularly misused terms clear so that we know when to associate them with positive or negative connotation.
In terms of cybersecurity, hackers are people who try to gain access to information in a computer over a network without authorisation. They are often not malicious in nature and they try to do this as part of a research or in relation to their job. They help to discover the loop holes in an information system or network that other malicious people would have exploited to cause harm.
A hacker is NOT a bad person in the original meaning of the word. S/he is someone who knows how to improvise a solution to a problem whose known solution is not at sight. Because some of these intelligent and learned class sometimes misuse their knowledge, then they became associated with bad stuffs. This has led to the phrase Ethical hacking. Companies employ ethical hackers to use their knowledge to find out the security flaws in their network. As every knowledge could as well be misused, some hackers who use their knowledge to a negative end has now given the word a negative connotation and are referred to as not being ethical. The same would go to a medical doctor, musician, lawyer or any other professional that uses his/her knowledge for negative reasons. So, in that case we would have phrases like ethical Doctors and non-ethical doctors, ethical lawyers and non-ethical lawyers…
Again, to be convinced that hacking is not a bad term in itself, you may have heard the word hackathons. These are events where intelligent and talented dudes hew up quick solutions to a problem in less than 48 to 72 hours. So they hack-up a solution.
Academic researchers in computer science involve in hacking. However, they discover security problems for big organisations, fix the issue in form of software patches or updates and then publish their findings in due time after the solution is found. So, it is not expected that our families and friends should always associate ‘hacking’ with being bad.
According to dignited.com, hackers build while crackers break. So cracking refers to the uninformed process of breaking into a computer system for bad intentions. Crackers are generally not learned and they use software tools created by programmers to launch their attack. They probably want to steal information, destroy a system or bring a network to stand still. Their sole intention is to compromise the system.
So brethren, understand the context in which hacking and cracking are being used. As hacking now has some negative connotation, it is important to know that the work of ethical hackers is to ensure that you are protected from the bad guys. So I encourage you to seek advice from any ethical hacker around you concerning your home wifi, home security cams, phones, computers and other Internet of Thing (IoT)- devices in your home.