Bradley - Hacking With Kali Linux: A Comprehensive, Step-By-Step Beginners Guide to Learn Ethical Hacking With Practical Examples to Computer Hacking, Wireless Network, Cybersecurity and Penetration Testing

We first heard the phrase, ethical hacking, back in 1995 when it was used by John Patrick, the Vice President of IBM but the concept is much older than that. There are those that claim the vast majority of hackers aim to be ethical hackers but, right now, that doesnt seem to be the case with the news full of stories of major hacking scandals and it really isnt any wonder that all hackers are tarred with the same brush of being nothing more than criminals. To gain a better understanding of the truth, we need to go back in time.

The Hackers Origins

When we talk about ethical hacking in terms of history, what we are really taking about is general hacking. It wasnt always considered bad to be a hacker and the modern context of the word actually came from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During the 1960s, the term was commonly used by students of engineering to describe several methods of system optimization and machine optimization to make them more efficient. Hacking was nothing more than a kind of hobby, done by some incredibly bright people and the idea of an ethical hacker comes way before the idea of the criminal hacker.

Tiger Teams and Phreakers

It wasnt until the 1970s that things began to get a bit darker. As computers grew in popularity, so did the number of people of understood computer programming and systems languages and they were starting to see that there were potential benefits to testing systems to see what they could do.

It was about this time that we started to hear of phreakers, people who could manipulate the telecommunication systems, and who could truly understand the nature of the telephone networks. They would make use of devices that could mimic a dialing tone for the purpose of routing phone calls - this gave them the opportunity to make their own phone calls free of charge, particularly the long distance calls that were very expensive. It could be argued that phreakers were considered to be the first illegal hackers.

However, at the same time, companies and government departments were starting to see how beneficial it could be to have experts in place who could find weaknesses in their systems, thus stopping activities like phreaking from happening. These were called the tiger teams and the US government made good use of them for the purpose of shoring up their defense systems.

The Black Hat Hacker Rises Up

During the 1980s and the 1990s, we began to hear the term, hacker, used pretty much only with criminal activity. The personal computer was now a very popular tool, not just for individuals but for businesses too and that meant there were large amounts of personal and sensitive data being stored within computer programs. The hackers could see the potentials in stealing that data and using it for fraudulent behavior or selling it one to other unscrupulous persons.

We began to see a profile building up in the media, a negative profile of hacking where hackers were nothing more than criminals who were stealing data and blackmailing companies into parting with a lot of money, just by using skills they had learned. We call these black hat hackers, people who only want to use their skills for malicious activities. Black hats are the ones we hear about the most in the media and recent years have seen some very high-profile attacks on the biggest companies in the world, like Sony and Amazon.

The Modern Cybercriminal is More Sophisticated

Every day, an estimated 30,000 + websites are hacked into, which just shows you how widespread modern hacking is. Some of those hackers are very inexperienced, using tools that other hackers write and not having any real understanding of what they are doing while others are incredibly sophisticated in their attacks, constantly looking for ways to get what they want.

We also tend to think of a hacker as someone who spends all day in a darkened room tapping away at their computer. That may be the case for some but there are other methods in use, form password cracking to social engineering, where a person is duped into passing on sensitive information or personal details.

The Regeneration of the Ethical Hacker

Over time, hackers have definitely become a lot smarter and they are far more persistent and that means businesses and government departments have had to build up their own defenses to try to stop them. This is the reason the ethical hacking concept is being used more and more to combat the problems these businesses face.