Hacking and data breaches are always a hot topic. According to Statista, the number of attacks on the web blocked every day between 2017 and 2018 alone increased by 56.1%. That’s more than half in a single year – according to Security Magazine, there were more than 4,000 publicly disclosed breaches that exposed over 22 billion records in 2021 alone – what if we told you that many more data breaches go undisclosed? There is a very big probability that ten or twenty data breaches went undisclosed this week alone!
Whenever data breaches are discussed, hackers seem to get all of the attention. However, a question that’s probably as old as the hackers themselves would be just what exactly constitutes a “hacker”? Read on to find out!
Contrary to popular belief, the term “hacker” is not necessarily always a technical term – a “hacker” is simply someone who does something in a way that’s not considered to be “popular”: have you ever stirred your coffee with a fork? You’re now a hacker!
However, nowadays the term is mostly associated with computers and software – in this realm, a “hacker” is anyone (the term can be used for both males and females) who accesses a computer system without authorization. Hackers can have multiple types – called hats in this sphere – too – there are “white hat” hackers, “grey hat” hackers, and “black hat” hackers. The colors of their hat depict whether they’re good or bad – white hat hackers use their cyber security-related skills for the good, while black hat hackers use them to wreck havoc on pretty much any computer system that gets in their way. There are also grey hat hackers that dabble somewhere in between – such people usually don’t mean to do harm, however, their actions are questionable: they may breach a system in order to alert an owner of the system that it’s vulnerable and do other questionable things.
Then there are also script kiddies – they’re the people that almost exclusively employ scripts created by other people to carry out attacks. Contrary to popular belief, script kiddies can be just as dangerous as skilled hackers because they employ the same cyber security tools used by skilled cyber-crooks – the only difference between them is that most of the time, script kiddies have close to no technical knowledge.
Some black hat hackers may be so “elite” that they start to operate in organized cyber-criminal gangs, but they’re more of an exception rather than the norm and they all usually land behind bars pretty quickly.
Now that you know what hackers are, it’s time to protect yourself, your team, and your applications from them. Follow these basic steps to make sure you start off on good footing security-wise:
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article and that you’ve learned something new in the cyber security domain or at least expanded your knowledge a little bit. Make sure to continue keeping an eye on the BreachDirectory blog, make good use of the capabilities provided by the data breach search engine and the BreachDirectory API, and we’ll see you in the next one!
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