They sit in the night at flickering monitors. They go through the keys on the keyboard, typing strange lines of encoded phrases. They seek to gain access to information, hack a server, just joke or commit a crime. These are hackers - geniuses and villains of the computer age.
In understanding who a hacker is, there are many conjectures, legends and myths that are poorly retold on the pages of various sites. For some people, these are computer geniuses who are well versed in hardware and software. Able to literally work miracles with one click of the mouse. For others, these are teenagers digging in garbage, trying to find an interesting disk or password to access the required server. Psychologists cheating users. Thieves stealing access to credit cards. There is no consensus, but the fact remains that there are hackers and sometimes they create problems.
Geniuses and villains
He became famous at the age of seventeen. For the sake of pampering, he hacked into telephone networks and redirected calls from subscribers. And one of his greatest achievements was illegal access to the Pentagon's computer. The most famous and most gifted hacker in history is Kevin Mitnick. As a result, he was caught and received a term in prison. He is currently out and runs his own company to protect against hacker attacks.
Another genius got access to the live broadcast of NBC in five minutes, was able to organize his own performance and all for the sake of pampering. McDonald's, Yahoo, Microsystems, Microsoft - and this is not a complete list of companies affected by Adrian Lamo, a famous hacker in the eighties. He now also works as a security specialist, like Kevin.
He took an ordinary box of oatmeal, found a toy whistle inside and began to use it to hack into telephone networks. By a "lucky" coincidence, it turned out that the signal emitted by the whistle coincides with the frequency of the electrical signal used to access the long-distance telephone network. John Draper is rightfully considered one of the first hackers in history, since he was arrested for his activities in the distant seventies of the last century.
In essence, a hacker attack is illegal access to various servers of official organizations. It could be the same Pentagon, NASA, security services. However, formally a hacker attack can even be called a hacking of the computer of a neighbor on the site.
She is characterized by knowledge of the psychology of users. For example, you can call an organization, formally introduce yourself as a security specialist who checks the company's networks for vulnerabilities, and gain access to the corporate network. This trick, of course, was very popular in the eighties and nineties, when computer literacy was not at its best. But even now it sometimes works.
You can organize an attack by infecting the target computer with a virus. Or access it using PC remote control programs. There are a lot of methods and a significant number of them are known only to specialists.
Good or evil
On the one hand, a hacker is a kind of bully who dreams of studying a computer thoroughly and making a name for himself. Sometimes it's just a naughty teenager, sometimes a grown man with delusions of grandeur. On the other hand, a hacker is a villain who transfers money from citizens' accounts to his own. On the third, there is a computer security specialist who will be gladly hired by a well-known company.
