Hacking is the act of exploring and manipulating the works of another computer or other technological device or system, either for the purpose of understanding how it works or to gain unauthorized access. Hacking is the unauthorized use of computer and network resources and a fraudulent act that is illegal in some ways and helpful in others. The term “hacker” originally meant a very gifted programmer. However, in the recent years the term hacker turned out into something bad and now has a negative implication. It’s troublesome to know that when other people hear the work hacker or hacking it seems that the first thing that pops up out of their minds is that it’s “illegal”.
Now the real question comes out, is hacking ethical or unethical? Or rather is it legal or illegal? It seems that there is a factor of morality when it comes to hacking and I believe that the morality of hacking depends on the person, in this case, the hacker. There is what other techie people call “Ethical Hacking”. Ethical hacking is the act of hacking when it is done by request and under contact between an ethical hacker and an organization initiating the hack. The difference is that the ethical hacker has authorization to whatever he hacks that is in the interest of the organization. Ethical hackers also hack security systems of a certain organization to show its downfall and weaknesses in order to improve it.
When I and my group had our interview in the IT department of our adopted organization we took the opportunity to ask our interviewee if hacking is ethical and unethical. His answer was the same. Hacking can be ethical or unethical it all depends on the objective of the hack. He shared to us one of his experiences in hacking. It was when their organization received a bogus anonymous bomb threat via email which messed up their business because their customers became uneasy because of it. It took two days before their management heeded the help of their IT department and told him to track down who sent the bogus threat. When he was about to track the sender he found out that the IP address and the email address of the sender was masked (hidden) so there was no way of tracking the sender without cracking it. So he cracked the mask one by one then he eventually found out that the sender was only from a nearby area near their establishment. He told us that what he did was one example of ethical hacking because he did it for the good interest of their organization.
However, if there is ethical hacking there would also be unethical hacking. Unethical hacking is exactly what other people usually think about hacking. Hacking becomes unethical when a hacker intrudes or penetrates a system, a network, or device to acquire unauthorized access. We usually see this kind of hackers in movies like Die Hard 4, National Treasure, Swordfish and Transformers where the hackers hacked for unauthorized access, tampering and stealing data. Our facilitator in our Management Information System 1 subject also gave his insights on hacking, he said that when you penetrate or break into something that is private and look into the data and information inside it, it is simply called “peeping” But when you tamper the data even just putting an asterisk, you then are hacking.
There are people who are not aware of ethical hacking and unethical hacking and I think that there are many of us who commit the act of hacking without even knowing it. I’ve observed many sites being hacked and it endangers the security of the data and it encourages other people to do the act of hacking. People might think it’s cool because of what we see in movies and that hackers are very intelligent programmers.
There is a big difference between ethical hacking and unethical hacking and I think that people must be aware of so that they would have a right perception about hacking and one day hacking would return to its original positive implication. IT people should be aware of this so that they would now their limitations because there are a lot IT people who are committing the act of hacking without even knowing it and without even knowing the consequence of their acts.
When I and my group had our interview in the IT department of our adopted organization we took the opportunity to ask our interviewee if hacking is ethical and unethical. His answer was the same. Hacking can be ethical or unethical it all depends on the objective of the hack. He shared to us one of his experiences in hacking. It was when their organization received a bogus anonymous bomb threat via email which messed up their business because their customers became uneasy because of it. It took two days before their management heeded the help of their IT department and told him to track down who sent the bogus threat. When he was about to track the sender he found out that the IP address and the email address of the sender was masked (hidden) so there was no way of tracking the sender without cracking it. So he cracked the mask one by one then he eventually found out that the sender was only from a nearby area near their establishment. He told us that what he did was one example of ethical hacking because he did it for the good interest of their organization.
However, if there is ethical hacking there would also be unethical hacking. Unethical hacking is exactly what other people usually think about hacking. Hacking becomes unethical when a hacker intrudes or penetrates a system, a network, or device to acquire unauthorized access. We usually see this kind of hackers in movies like Die Hard 4, National Treasure, Swordfish and Transformers where the hackers hacked for unauthorized access, tampering and stealing data. Our facilitator in our Management Information System 1 subject also gave his insights on hacking, he said that when you penetrate or break into something that is private and look into the data and information inside it, it is simply called “peeping” But when you tamper the data even just putting an asterisk, you then are hacking.
There are people who are not aware of ethical hacking and unethical hacking and I think that there are many of us who commit the act of hacking without even knowing it. I’ve observed many sites being hacked and it endangers the security of the data and it encourages other people to do the act of hacking. People might think it’s cool because of what we see in movies and that hackers are very intelligent programmers.
There is a big difference between ethical hacking and unethical hacking and I think that people must be aware of so that they would have a right perception about hacking and one day hacking would return to its original positive implication. IT people should be aware of this so that they would now their limitations because there are a lot IT people who are committing the act of hacking without even knowing it and without even knowing the consequence of their acts.
1 comment:
It's sad how the term 'hacking' is now tagged as something bad or illegal by most people nowadays. Certainly, the unauthorized access of the hackers in the past which yielded unwanted results to various systems. We were more focused to the 'aftershocks' of the deed. Yet what concerns more is the intention of the hacker. Is he doing that just for fun without minding the harms he could give to the owners of the systems? Or did he do that for a more beneficial purpose? Whatever it is, both sides are affected. I hope people will change their mindset about hackers or crackers or whatever and should know the real score between them. :-)
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