HACKING:
THE NO-NONSENSE
GUIDE
Learn Ethical Hacking Within 12 Hours!
Cyberpunk University
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Find out more about our other books in the series:
Python: The No-Nonsense Guide, Learn Python Programming Within 12 Hours!
2. Hacking: The No-Nonsense Guide, Learn Ethical Hacking Within 12 Hours!
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CYBERPUNK HACKING INFOGRAPHIC
Table of Contents
Hour 1: Introduction to Hacking and Types of Hackers
When computers emerged as the mandatory devices to successfully run businesses, process personal data, and save information, it was only a matter of time before the society became wholly dependent on them for every aspect of life.
The emergence of the Internet marked a point of no return to the relationship that humanity has with machines. We now depend on computers for almost all types of communications, shopping, business, entertainment, and mainly to stay alive. This networking of computers to facilitate communication has however exposed our personal and business information to the outside world and cyber crime.
Cybercrime is the use of computers to commit fraudulent acts that may include privacy invasion, sabotage, fraud, and disseminating confidential information among others. Cybercrime has grown to become a very serious threat to peoples lives and costs many individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments around the world billions of dollars every year.
Most people committing these cybercrimes are hackers. Paradoxically, the people that the victims of this crime need to protect themselves, their data, and information infrastructure against such attacks are also hackers except they are a different kind of hackers.
Before we can dive deep into understanding hackers, first let us understand what hacking is.
1.1 What is hacking?
The definition of hacking is very broad. For the purpose of this book, we can define hacking as the process of finding weaknesses in computer systems and computer network systems and exploiting them to gain access to information.
We can, therefore, say that a hacker is a person who identifies and exploits weaknesses in computer systems and/or networks to access information. A hacker is typically a skilled computer programmer with knowledge of computer and network security.
1.2 Types of Hackers
The word hacker is usually synonymous with someone attacking a computer or computer network for malicious or selfish reasons, but that is not always the case. Now that we have established what a hacker does, we can classify them into four based on the intent of their actions.
White Hat (Ethical) Hacker
You are taking this crash course to become a White hat or ethical hacker. You will learn the skills and have the ability to gain access to computer and network systems to identify and fix weaknesses. You will also perform various computing tasks such as vulnerability assessment and carry out penetration testing.
Grey Hat Hacker
Somewhere between a white hat (ethical) and black hat (criminal) hackers lies the gray hat hacker. This individual breaks into a computer or computer network system without prior consent from the authority to (or intending to) identify weaknesses in the system and reveal them to the system owner for a reward or a job to fix the weakness.
Black hat (Criminal) Hacker
Also a criminal hacker, a black hat hacker is an individual who gains unauthorized access to a computer or network system for personal gain. A black hat hacker typically accesses a system to demonstrate his prowess in hacking, to violate policy rights, steal corporate data, etc. or deny legitimate users service.
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