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:
.png)
