Ask any developer if he has ever hacked. Ask yourself if you ever been a hacker. The answers will probably be yes.We have all hacked, at one time or another, for one reason or another. Administrators hack to find shortcuts around configuration obstacles. Security professionals attempt to wiggle their way into an application/database through  nintentional (or even intentional) backdoors; they may even attempt to bring systems down in various ways. Security professionals hack into networks and applications because they are asked to; they are asked to find any weakness
that they can and then disclose them to their employers.They are performing ethical hacking in which they have agreed to disclose all findings back to the employer, and they may have signed nondisclosure agreements to verify that they will NOT disclose this information to anyone else. But you don’t have to be a hired security professional to
perform ethical hacking. Ethical hacking occurs anytime you are “testing the limits” of the code you have written or the code that has been written by a co-worker. Ethical hacking is done in an attempt to prevent malicious attacks from being successful.

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Notoriety, challenge, boredom, and revenge are just a few of the motivations of a hacker. Hackers can begin the trade very innocently. Most often they are hacking to see what they can see or what they can do. They may not even realize the depth of what they are attempting to do. But as time goes on, and their skills increase, they begin to realize the potential of what they are doing.There is a misconception that hacking is done mostly for personal gain, but that is probably one of the least of the reasons.

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Hacking in one sense began back in the 1940’s and 1950’s when amateur radio enthusiasts would tune in on police or military radio signals to listen in on what was going on. Most of the time these “neo-hackers” were simply curious “information junkies,” looking for interesting pieces of information about government or military activities.The thrill was in being privy to information channels that others were not and doing so undetected.

Hacking and technology married up as early as the late sixties, when Ma Bell’s early phone technology was easily exploited, and hackers discovered the ability to make free phone calls, which we discuss in the next section. As technology advanced, so did the hacking methods used. It has been suggested that the term hacker, when used in reference to computer hacking, was first adopted by MIT’s computer culture. At the time, the word only referred to a gifted and enthusiastic programmer who was somewhat of a maverick or rebel.

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Let’s take a couple of minutes to be certain that bookyou understand what it means when we talk about a hacker. Many different terms are used to describe a hacker, many of which have different connotations depending on who is describing whom.Take a look at The Jargon File (http://info.astrian.net/jargon) to get a sense of how the community has developed its own vocabulary and culture.

Webster’s Dictionary appropriately defines hacking as a variety of things, including a destructive act that leaves something mangled or a clever way to circumvent a problem; a hacker can be someone who is enthusiastic about an activity. Similarly, in the IT world, not every “hacker” is malicious, and hacking isn’t always done to harm someone.

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You are probably familiar with the attacks of February 2000 on eBay, Yahoo,Amazon, as well as other major e-commerce and non–e-commerce Web sites.Those attacks were all Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and all occurred at the server level.Those same attacks moved hacking to center stage in the IT community and in the press.

With that spotlight comes an increased awareness by information security specialists, project managers, and other IT professionals. More and more companies are looking to tighten up security. As a result, hackers have become more creative and more talented, raising the bar on security from not only a network administration standpoint, but also from an applications development standpoint.

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