Hacker Essay Example for Free

Hacker Essay The advancement of information technology spans a lot of areas of our lives. Information technology has made a huge difference in industry, agriculture and services. This in turn boosts up the productivity of the society. However, the development of computer technology also leads to many security problems in our modern society. There has emerged a group of computer savvy people who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network. Their motivation has put many questions on debating table. On the one hand, many people contend that a hacker is a dangerous person who will probably destroy the whole world’s computer system. On the other hand, others argue that hackers are not dangerous and not causing harm. This essay will discuss the two sides of the coin with regard to hackers with relevant examples. First of all, the definition of hacking and hackers need to be clearly understood so as to have an insight into hacking. Hacking can be defined as any kind of computer crimes. Pirating is the most popular form of hacking, which relates to the stealing information from written software programmes. In the computer security context, hackers are people who try to find the weaknesses of the computer network and exploit the information from software. Hackers may be encouraged by a variety of reasons, for instance profits, protests, or challenges. Hackers can be categorised into the three types, which are black hats, grey hats, and white hats. Black hat group or cracker is expertise in carrying out the harmful to the computer system. A grey hat is a hacking group that will not violate the law and help the government to defend the system. However, grey hat will apply the same methods to revert to black hat approaches. The white hat hacker has their own abilities and professional computing skills to protect the malicious threads and they can work for the government as security consultant or security analyst(Tim,2004). It is a common view that hackers are a threat to individual users, business and society as a whole. Hackers usually look for the bankcard details through breaking into the baking computer systems. With the information about customers of the banks, they can steal a huge amount of money, which cause a financial crisis to individuals. At the organizational level, regarding information of the organization such as research business plan or even financial reports is always involves with hacking. Digital database of the customer is also one of the target of hackers, with hackers stealing names , addresses, emails and financial data from organizations. Such a loss of data to a samall business may cost a competitive edge or the complete loss of a customer base, effectively ruining the organization. On the other hand, a business that involve in computer hacking may gain the benefits of data providing the competitive edge and access to the new customer bases through hacking. Personal or political data gained through computer hacking could serve as leverage in business or political dealings(Markoff, 2005). At the society level, apart from financial damage which is similar to individuals, hackers may hack into the national infrastructure system or business system then can control the electrical power plants, transportation, gas, and oil which called the threats of cyber terrorism(Moore, 2005). Moreover, for the military purpose if hacker could access to the system they can track the military movement or even know the exact position where the military camps are set. Compared with other terrorist methods, cyber terrorism needs only few personal and few inputs to achieve their intentions and does have to be physically attacked(Eric, 2012). Cyber terrorists can actually operate their mission from a distance to create damage from a distance and the security agents cannot find them because they change IP address to hide their address and finally it becomes the most challenge issue for the government agents to indentify and capture them(Eric,2012). However there are some positive consequences that hackers bring to the safer security environment of the organization. It is thought that hackers are not always a harmful to the society but have significant role to protect the society from attackers. Over the years computer-related crimes have become more sophisticated. New network security is become more important about defending and documenting defenses. People are finding out about firewalls and putting them up and also find out about VPN server security and actually instantiate VPN servers. It is normally not about modeling an attack the method an attacker would. Those are very different things. With a view to enhancing the network security, some popular practices have been applied. or example, ethical hacking is looking for the weakness in the network system under operations, portfolioing these loopholes and finding the solutions to compensate those weakness by reinforcing some features of the system to prevent likely attacks from computer crimminals( Tim ed al. , 2004). Hacking is also widely being used to rectify data security issues for busin esses. Certain types of hackers such as Grey hat works with businesses to strengthen the security system by assisting the company whereby seeking out the weaknesses of the system. For instance, Gregory Evans who ever caught because of criminal hacking, is now working for the US government as a security consultant(Markoff, 2005). Furthermore, Brand innovation has included one of the advantages of hacking. Hacking can be employed to increase the revenue of the company by using of acknowledgement of hackers to create some new ideas and destruct the old products. In order to implement this, hackers must have to go through the system and change the brand’s code(Tim, 2004). In conclusion, it is a bias- based opinion that people can conclude when looking just only at the downside of the hacking. However, there are some good perspectives of hacking. I personally believe that hackers are not always causing harm, but help the security system to protect the system from other hackers. All things considered, hackers, together with hacking, are not always dangerous. They could act as a driving force for all the computer programmers to unstoppingly correct all the weaknesses in the system and discover new and more effective software.