Week 10 — I got black, I got white; what do you want?

▶ DIGC202 GLOBAL NETWORKS

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Hacking has been around since the 1960s and has always been a form of crime — never will you find an article or a story that says that hacking is a good thing, I mean getting hacked is even a lot worse. Although, I have found something interesting about hacking, turns out there are many types of hackers but I will be talking about two main types of hackers — the black hat and the white hat hackers. These two hackers have been in feud for a long time, to put it in short — one’s the good guy and ones the bad guy.

Image taken from searchsecurity.techtarget.com

The Black Hat
These hackers are the darkest ones, the ones that are illegal. They are the people that you should really look out for. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to look out for them because they can attack at any given moment and you wouldn’t be able to retaliate back since they are hard to track and almost entirely anonymous — they are highly skilled and can hack to steal personal data like credit card information, where you live and your whole name. They are known for spreading malware and basically shutting down and destroying an entire computer system, and to tie it altogether they frequently work on or with the black market — whether it’s selling or communicating with people from the inside. The most notorious black hat hacker is Kevin Mitnick, in the 90s he went on a hacking spree for two and half years conducting wire fraud and stealing millions of dollars worth of data from telecommunication companies and even the National Defense warning system (Tripwire Guest Authors, 2016).

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The White Hat
The White Hat hackers are the polar opposites of the Black Hats, they are the legal and ethical ones. These hackers are typically hired by companies and are also working for governments, they help their employers to find holes in their company’s network and security with the use of hacking (Ruesink, 2017). White Hat hackers are specialists that protect their company’s data secured and unhackable from the Black Hat hackers — one of the world’s famous white hat hackers is the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds; he experimented on operating systems for years on his computer before he released the secure open-source operating software we all know today (Lee, 2012).

Image taken from thesun.co.uk

Just from these two descriptions you can clearly line out who commits cybercrimes and who is the ‘cyber police,’ one of the biggest cyber attacks there is happened to the most renown web service in the world… Yahoo! In 2014, over 500 million user accounts were affected by the attack (Outpost24, 2018) — names, telephone numbers, birthdays and passwords were stolen. But that wasn’t the end; fast-forward to three years after the 2014 cyber attack Yahoo! got hacked once again, this time losing 32 million more accounts in the fire — this lead to the Department of Justice reopening the investigation from the previous cyber attack and this time come up with a lead since they found that a tool that the hackers have stolen from Yahoo! in 2014, which allows for them to produce malicious cookies and log in without the need of a password. Four suspected culprits were also taken into questioning — two Russian spies and two hackers (Larson, 2017).

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This incident and many cyber crimes plays a big part as to how cyber warfare will play out in the future. Technology is constantly changing which means that it will get harder to break into networks and systems, a more higher level of skill and material would be needed if anyone is even thinking about trying. But if four people were capable to get a hold of one of the biggest web services in the world in the year 2014 and again 3 years later, who knows what potential threats there are in store for us in the future?

References:

1. Larson, S. (2017, October 4). Every single Yahoo account was hacked. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/technology/business/yahoo-breach-3-billion-accounts/index.html.
2. Lee, J. (2012, July 13). 5 Of The World’s Most Famous And Most Influential White Hat Hackers. Retrieved from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-worlds-famous-influential-white-hat-hackers/.
3. Outpost24. (2018, December 3). TOP 10 of the world’s largest cyberattacks. Retrieved from https://outpost24.com/blog/top-10-of-the-world-biggest-cyberattacks.
4. Ruesink, M. (2017, February 22). Types of Hackers: White Hat vs. Black Hat & Every Shade in Between. Retrieved from https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/technology/blog/types-of-hackers/.
5. Tripwire Guest Authors. (2016, August 17). The Evolution of Hacking. Retrieved from https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/cyber-security/the-evolution-of-hacking/.