What Everyone Should Know About Computer Hacking

“Hacking” is a term blown up by the media to describe evil criminals who sit behind computers all day and break into high security government systems and/or innocent citizen’s computer to spread viruses and create all kinds of havoc.

This is true about 10% of the time.

The word “Hacking” or “Hacker” are extremely broad and misleading terms. If you went to any community of technical experts and asked them how to become a “Hacker”, they would laugh at you and make fun of you. Hacking can mean anything - stealing passwords, social engineering, probing a network for open security holes, analyzing code from an application, or just plain programming. Hacking isn’t a simple 1-2-3 step process. It can involve many different fields of study and it’s constantly changing day to day. 

Many times people have wondered why hackers do what they do. Many times amateurs ask how to become one. The first thing that anyone should learn about hackers is that they aren’t always who you think they are. Sure, there are immoral hackers out there that like to steal information and use it for harmful purposes. Sometimes these hackers do their hacking purely to improve their ego or just show that they can “do it”. However, there are also “good” hackers out there. These are referred to as “White Hat” hackers. They enjoy technology, they love computers, and they spend a lot of time learning about them. Part of this learning involves discovering what makes a computer vulnerable to attacks.