When we hear the word ‘hacker’,
what is the first thing that comes to our mind? They are bad people! We think
that hackers are the ones who attack computers and steal information and so on.
To some extent it is true, there are such people. But they make a very small
portion of all the hackers. There are hackers with good intentions called
ethical hackers. They find out issues with the software and let the software
owner know the problem before an unethical hacker exploits it.
Hackers are the ones who look at
computers very differently than the rest of others. It is their thinking
ability and vision that leads to real invention. In fact, companies like
Google, Microsoft and Facebook gives bounties in tens of thousands of dollars
for ethical hackers who find critical vulnerabilities.
Many security and network
protocols maintain open standards, so that researchers and other ethical
hackers can find out any problems with the protocol. The prime example here can
be public key encryption protocol. This protocol is security critical and is
used to to protect our banking, business and e-commerce data. The underlying algorithm is
public, but is still hard to crack as it requires immense computational power.
Till date, people have not found any backdoor to this security protocol and
millions are being spent to make sure none such exist, or if they exist the
good guys find them first.
Well, there are malicious hackers
too. For example, the computer virus CryptoLocker, recently in news which
encrypts all the data in the computer and will give you the decryption key only
if you pay some money.
In reality, most hackers want to
learn the complexity of the computer world and solve real complex problems. Hope
such hackers gain numbers.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jameslyne/2013/10/22/computer-virus-spreading-that-means-you-never-get-to-see-your-files-again/
That was a pretty interesting post. I like how you started off with the two different sides of hacking, and then give praise to those hackers that do help us. The last half of your post was a bit alarming. I was aware of the many things that viruses could do, like brick your computer or steal your data, but that CyrptoLocker virus doesn't even care about stealing data; all it does is extort money out of people and businesses.
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