Classification of Hackers

Classification of Hackers

Hackers can be classified into different categories such as white hat, black hat, and grey hat, based on their intent of hacking a system. These different terms comes from old Spaghetti Westerns, where the bad guy wears a black cowboy hat and the good guy waers the white hat.

White Hat Hackers

White hat hackers are also known as Ethical Hackers. They never intent to harm a system, rather they try to find out a weakness in a computer or network system as a part of penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.

Ethical hacking is not illegal and is one of the demanding jobs available in the IT industary. There are numerious companies that hire ethical hackers for penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.

Black Hat Hackers

Black hat hackers, also known as crackers, are those who hack in order to gain unauthorized access to a system and harms its operations or steal sensitive information.

Black hat hacking is always illegal because of its bad intent which includes stealing corporate data, violating privacy, damaging system, blocking network communication etc.

Grey Hat Hackers

Grey hat hackers are a blend of both black hat and white hat hackers. They act without malicious intent but for their fun, they exploit a security weakness in a computer system or network without the owners permission or knowledge.

Their intent is to bring the weakness to the attention of the owners and getting appericiation or a little bounty from owners.

Miscellaneous Hackers

Apart of from the above well known classes of hackers, we have the following categories of hackers based on what they hack and how they do it –

Red Hat Hackers

Red hat hackers are again a blend of both black hat and white hat hackers. They are usually on level of hacking government agencies, top seceret information hubs, and generally anything that falls under the category of sensetive information.

Blue Hat Hackers

A blue hat hacker is someone outside computer secutiry consulting firms who is used to bug test a system prior to its launch. They look for loop holes that can be exploited and try to close these gaps. Microsoft also uses the term blue hat to represent the series of security briefing events.

Elite Hackers

This is a social status among hackers, which is used to describe the most skilled. Newly discovered exploits will circulate among these hackers.

Script Kiddie

A script kiddie is a non expert who breaks into a computer systems by using pre-packaged automated tools written by others, usually with little understanding of the underlying concept, hence the term kiddie.

Neophyte

A neophyte, “noobe”, or “newbie” or “green hat hacker” is someone who is new to hackingor phreaking and has almost no knowledge or experience of the workings of technology and hacking.

Hacktivist

A hacktivist is a hacker who utilizes technology to announce a social, ideological, religous, or political message. In general, most hacktivism involves website defacement or denial of serice attacks.

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