What is a Hacker ?
Often, the word hacker conjures up imaginary worlds populated by malevolent, hooded pirates. Hackers are often perceived as a shadowy, secretive or even marginal grouping, which certainly helps to fuel wild rumors about them.
This imagery is fueled by pop culture (in TV series like Mr Robot) to online image banks, where it is hard, often impossible, to find a picture of a hacker that is not an anonymous figure in a black hoodie.
However, there is actually a range of hacker profiles. There are black hats – cybercriminals attracted by bank fraud – and white hats – hackers who promote ethics and see themselves as cyber-activists rather than cybercriminals.
And somewhere in the middle between these two opposing camps, there are grey hats. Microsoft has invented its own term, blue hats, to refer to cybersecurity experts tasked with repairing vulnerabilities in security systems.
However, this article isn’t about black hats, white hats, grey hats, blue hats or even the well known hackers such as Kevin Mitnick, Brett Johnson, Julian Assange or Edward Snowden.
In this post, we’ll be discussing a prevalent group of hackers, known as script kiddies, that are wreaking havoc for organizations and individuals.