WHO IS HACKER AND WHO IS CRACKER

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****A HACKER IS NOT A CRACKER - Few words about this BY Ankit Fadia ****
(From Unofficial Guide to ETHICAL HACKING )

WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get
'Hacking' and 'Hackers' are terms that generally tend to have a negative effect on people. Most people straightway start associating 'Hackers' with computer criminals or people who cause harm to systems, release viruses, etc. And I do not blame them for holding such a negative opinion. You see, one tends to accepts what is being fed to him. And nowadays the media has been wrongly and outrageously referring to computer criminals as 'Hackers'. They fail to recognize the fact that criminals and hackers are two totally distinct terms and are not associated with each other whatsoever. People have wrong notions and for reasons not justified at all, they have a negative attitude and utter dislike for 'Hackers' and persons associated with 'Hacking'. The description of 'Hackers' provided by the media is nowhere near what hackers actually stand for. Hackers in reality are actually good, pleasant and extremely intelligent people, who by using their knowledge in a constructive manner help organizations to secure documents of strategic importance and even sometimes help justice to meet its ends by ferreting out electronic evidence. Rather, these are the people who help to keep computer criminals on the run.

Traditionally, hackers were computer geeks who knew almost everything about computers (both hardware and software) and were widely respected for their wide array of knowledge. But over the years, the reputation of hackers has been steadily going down. Today, they are feared by most people and are looked upon as icons representing the underground community of our population.

Hackers know everything about the way a software or an application works. They have this uncanny ability of finding out ways of doing the impossible. They do not accept software application in the form they are meant to be in but more often than not find ways of making software work the way they want it to. They debug code and use trial and error methods to discover unknown and new tricks and secrets. They do try to break into systems but have the decency not to cause any damage or steal passwords, etc., but instead they report the hole or vulnerability to the system administrator. They try to break free from restrictions and discover new hidden features. You see hacking is about knowledge. Hackers are those really intellectual people who have the extra bit of information. They know of things normal people would only dream of.

However, after saying all this I must admit that there is a very thin line between hackers (nice people) and crackers (not-so-nice people He He He) and not many people can resist the temptation of crossing it.

The reason as to why so-called hackers want to cross the line and become crackers is that they can get quick popularity (but negative). Also normal people do not find your achievements respectful. They donot believe that a person who defaces sites, performs Denial of Services attacks, releases viruses, etc., is good enough to be respected. This combined with the media hype, makes people quickly stamp hackers as computer criminals.

Tell a system administrator about vulnerability in one of his systems, he would surely start respecting you. And besides thanking you, he might even give you the permission to break into his systems. Wow!!! Isn't that what all hackers dream of?

I in fact support hacking and want more people to become hackers, break into systems, but do only right things. Do something that does no harm to anyone. All real hackers know that an important hackers ethic is to never delete any files, or cause any damage to the system which you have broken into. Make good use of your additional bit of knowledge by doing something legal, something to improve the services and quality offered by companies, something which will do good to the software industry, something which will do good to the economy. If you do even one of the above, I assure you, you will definitely become famous and would probably be sitting on a pot of gold.

Right? All I want to say is that instead of being resentful and afraid of fire, it would be much better, if we learn to live with fire and fight fire with fire itself.

 

Info From Ankith fadia book