Visually Explaining the process of Hacking.

Jack Leonard
Visually Explained
Published in
2 min readJan 14, 2016

This Infographic was originally posted on the Barricade Blog. Barricade Is an Early Warning System Against Hackers.

In 2015 alone it’s estimated that almost one billion personal records were illegally accessed, specifically: Healthcare, Financial, Educational & Employee records. The kind of thing you might think would be stored ever-so securely. Moreover, in 2015 we witnessed some of the most infamous hacks to date, namely: Ashley Madison, U.S. OPM, TalkTalk, Carphone Warehouse.

The stories of these breaches stormed popular culture. In fact the term ‘hack(ing)’ is so pervasive, driven by the media’s love affair with it as a buzzword, you could assume that knowing its meaning was second nature. Yet it remains an ambiguous, mysterious and frightening topic for most.

Fig 1.1) Black Box concept of Hacking

In this infographic we look at the five stages of a Web App Attack from a Hacker’s perspective. We’ll go through each of the five stages and dissect them into the following:

If there is one thing that you should take away from this Infographic, it is its motif: Without strong initial safeguards in place your system is increasingly defenseless. With each stage passed the probability of remediating the attack and putting a stop to the hacker lessens exponentially. Without an initial barricade there is not much you can do stop that hacker delving further into your system.

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Jack Leonard
Visually Explained

Jack Leonard is an Irish Entrepreneur, Product Designer & Developer who is fascinated by human behaviour.