Introduction to Hacking (Part - 01)| Basics of Ethical Hacking | Hacktech Beast

 Introduction To Hacking (Part - 01)

In the early 1990s, the word “hacker” was used to describe a great programmer, someone who was able to build complex logics. Unfortunately, over time the word gained negative hype, and the media started referring to a hacker as someone who discovers new ways of hacking into a system, be it a computer system or a programmable logic controller, someone who is capable of hacking into banks, stealing credit card information, etc. This is the picture that is created by the media and this is untrue because everything has a positive and a negative aspect to it. What the media has
been highlighting is only the negative aspect; the people that have been protecting organizations by responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities are not highlighted.

However, if you look at the media’s definition of a hacker in the 1990s, you would find a few common characteristics, such as creativity, the ability to solve complex problems, and new ways of
compromising targets. Therefore, the term has been broken down into three types:

1. White hat hacker—This kind of hacker is often referred to as a security professional or security researcher. Such hackers are employed by an organization and are permitted to attack an organization to find vulnerabilities that an attacker might be able to exploit.

2. Black hat hacker—Also known as a cracker, this kind of hacker is referred to as a bad guy, who uses his or her knowledge for negative purposes. They are often referred to by the media as hackers.
3. Gray hat hacker—This kind of hacker is an intermediate between a white hat and a black hat hacker. For instance, a gray hat hacker would work as a security professional for an organization and responsibly disclose everything to them; however, he or she might leave a backdoor to access it later and might also sell the confidential information, obtained after the compromise of a company’s target server, to competitors.

Similarly, we have categories of hackers about whom you might hear oftentimes. Some of them are as follows:

Script kiddie—Also known as skid, this kind of hacker is someone who lacks knowledge on how an exploit works and relies upon using exploits that someone else created. A script kiddie may be able to compromise a target but certainly cannot debug or modify an exploit in case it does not work.

Elite hacker—An elite hacker, also referred to as l33t or 1337, is someone who has deep knowledge on how an exploit works; he or she is able to create exploits, but also modify codes that someone else wrote. He or she is someone with elite skills of hacking.

Hacktivist—Hacktivists are defined as group of hackers that hack into computer systems for a cause or purpose. The purpose may be political gain, freedom of speech, human rights, and so on.

Ethical hacker—An ethical hacker is as a person who is hired and permitted by an organization to attack its systems for the purpose of identifying vulnerabilities, which an attacker might take advantage of. The sole difference between the terms “hacking” and “ethical hacking” is the permission.

Important Terminologies :-

Asset

An asset is any data, device, or other component of the environment that supports information related activities that should be protected from anyone besides the people that are allowed to view or manipulate the data/information.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is defined as a flaw or a weakness inside the asset that could be used to gain unauthorized access to it. The successful compromise of a vulnerability may result in data manipulation, privilege elevation, etc.

Threat

A threat represents a possible danger to the computer system. It represents something that an organization doesn’t want to happen. A successful exploitation of vulnerability is a threat. A threat may be a malicious hacker who is trying to gain unauthorized access to an asset.

Exploit

An exploit is something that takes advantage of vulnerability in an asset to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior in a target system, which would allow an attacker to gain access to data
or information.

Risk

A risk is defined as the impact (damage) resulting from the successful compromise of an asset. For example, an organization running a vulnerable apache tomcat server poses a threat to an organization and the damage/loss that is caused to the asset is defined as a risk. Normally, a risk can be calculated by using the following equation:

Risk = Threat * vulnerabilities * impact

------------------------------------------------------------------