White Hat Hackers

#hackers #anonymous #whitehat #networking #security

Oh the white hat, the lesser known hat in the hacker sphere (that's a thing), where as the black hat hacker exists with tools designed for destruction and dismay, the white hat uses the same tools for examination and dissection.  Same tools, two hats, how does that work?

Anyone ever tell you they were a hacker for a profession?  Ever hear of someone getting paid to be a hacker?  The vast majority of those professionals are what is known as a white hat hacker.  They aren't the overly glamorized black hats that appear in all the movies, somehow hacking on a 3D GUI of cubes while sipping on some over priced glass of Cabernet (yeah talking about you swordfish).  For some unknown reason Hollywood has imprinted this image in our minds that all hackers are bad guys, because I guess that's what sells?  Never seen a WW2 movie about the military janitors because its not exciting, guess the same applies to hackers?

Lets observe a few of the tools needed to make hacking possible and how their uses can vary.  A packet sniffer, a white hat will use it to find plain text transmissions and tell someone it needs to be fixed.  A port scanner, a white hat will use this to find open ports on workstations, servers, switches, printers, and anything that has a way into a system that shouldn't.  These are the same tools a black hat uses, to get those plain text files for their own use, or to find those ports to get in, they are used the same exact way but their intents are different.

That's our white hat buddy, this is what he does, the key fundamental differences is that a white hat searches for holes to patch, and black hats search for holes to exploit.  Generally speaking all these holes are oversights of some sort on the end of the programmer or security technician, very seldom will you find a hacker who can find and exploit a unique exploit.  That's the elite hat hacker, we'll get into that another day.

This is what a white hat is, a hacker, doesn't matter what shade the hat color is, they all use the same tools, they all do the same thing, just white hats have the intention of finding holes to fix.  Are they any less capable of destroying a mainframe with a zombie horde in under an hour?  Hell no, they profit from it and get to tell someone they made a mistake.  Want to talk about a sweet gig?  This is it.

When a black hat steals a credit card number, they go to jail.  When a white hat does it, they rub it in your face and you buy them a nice new suit for it.  Ethical hacking is where its at if you have fun being a hacker and breaking other peoples stuff.  I think that's all I have left to say on the topic so, as always, be safe my goblins.

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