Do
you lock your home before going to sleep? Do you lock your car when you are
going for shopping? I am sure your answer to both questions is yes. But, why do
we protect our property? Well, the answer to that is very simple and obvious.
We do not want anyone to steal our property nor do we want strangers to use our
property. Now, let us consider our digital property. Do you use online banking?
Do you check your emails regularly? Do you use social networking websites? In the
21st century, I assume the answers to these questions are yes. Now,
what if I tell you that someone can steal all of your personal information from
your digital world? Yes, you heard it right. If you are not protecting your
digital property, some hackers can steal your digital information. So, in this
blog post I would like to talk about what is hacking and how hacking is related
to us.
What is hacking?
Hacking
has many different interpretations. Many professionals use “hacking” to mean
clever programming. For instance, one my professor uses “hacking” to simply
mean computer programming. However, there is another interpretation of hacking
that is often used by our media and our society. According to that
interpretation, hacking is an act of breaking or stealing. In this context,
hacking means “gain unauthorized access to computer data: to use a computer or
other technological device or system in order to gain unauthorized access to
data held by another person or organization” (1).
Now,
you might be wondering what hacking has to do with you. Let me explain that by
giving you a realistic example. Imagine that you are browsing on the internet.
You might be checking emails, and you happen to get an email with an attached
file. If the attached file is corrupted (meaning it contains Trojan horse), then
malicious users can get access to your personal data. Perhaps, malicious users
can control your device and possibly ruin your device by deleting important
files. This is just a one simple scenario, hacking is usually more harmful than
the situation mentioned above. Hackers can have power of controlling our our
credit cards, to controlling our car breaks. In other words, anything that uses
software can be hacked and controlled by malicious users. Read further to know
more about what hackers can possibly do.
Who are hackers?
There
are various kinds of hackers in our society. Some of them hack for good causes
whereas others hack for unethical reasons. First, I will like to talk about
unethical hackers. Unethical hackers are those who hack to steal or gain access
to unauthorized software or networks. Their main purpose of hacking is to gain
benefits for themselves. On the other hand, there are other kinds of hackers
who hack for good causes. For example, big corporations and governments hire
hackers for security reasons. Corporations would like to check their cyber
security, and ask hackers to break into their system or find a loophole into
the software. Lastly, there are hackers who hack for fun or to challenge their
skills. Hackers of this type take hacking as a challenge.
References:
Hey Jay,
ReplyDeleteNice blog on Hacking. It is a very interesting read and connects the reader with subject. you provided a lot of information on hackers and hacking and how one can be effected by it. Nice pics but I would say if you change the layout a bit, that would look nice and wont make it seem like a long blog, like putting pics on left and right instead of just center. also, the Qr code on your blog, it works and looks good, but the placement kind of seems like out of arrangement if you know what i mean. other than that, great job on all the blogs. looking forward to keep reading your blogs.
Hi Jay,
ReplyDeleteNice blog post highlighting different types of hacking and the importance of keeping your digital information safe online. I like how you compared and contrasted physical things and keeping those safe with the digital things. I completely agree with you and I am quite big on information security as well. I like your use of pictures in your blog but it may be too many for this post. It might be better to have pictures directly correlate to what you are writing about. Keep up the good work.
Jeff Su
Thanks Jeffrey and Harsimran for reading and commenting on my blog. I took both of your advice and removed few images that was not correlating with the readings. For the placements, I tried my best to figure out best placings, but bloggers has few defaults that they would not allow us to change. Please let me know if you figure those out.
ReplyDeleteHi Jay,
ReplyDeleteThat is an excellent detailed post. It makes me want to read it again. I must say that you and I are on the same page on the topic that hacking could be a major threat to our society. If hackers try to hack into our computers, it will absolutely destroy our lives. I love the Q-& A styled introductory paragraph about your personal security for your property, and of course, yourself. It is true that strangers steal your property, and that would be quite similar to hackers stealing your information (i.e. email account, bank account, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). I especially like your stance because you wanted to present how hacking for malicious antics is morally repugnant.
One suggestion is that I would reread the post and check for grammar/sentence structure errors. There are a few sentences with minute errors that need to be fixed. You showed excessive amount of details. Nice work on your post. Keep blogging!
Jay,
ReplyDeleteYour post had me glued to my screen. I reread parts of your post multiple times before I continued and thought the format you wrote your post in was great. It was nice how you defined what is hacking, the relationship between users and hackers, and who are hackers. I believed that all of that was great but I felt like you could have mentioned more about hackers because there are three types out there. White hats, grey hats and black hats. If you took some time to research about them, I believe it would contribute greatly to your post.