Monday

Hacking

What Motivates a Hacker?

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Notoriety, challenge, boredom, and revenge are just a few of the motivations of a hacker. Hackers can start 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 deepness of what they are attempting to do. But as time goes on, and their skills increase, they start to realize the potential of what they are doing.Here is a misconception that hacking is done mostly for personal gain, but that is probably one of the least of the reasons.

More often than not, hackers are breaking into something so that they can say they did it.The knowledge a hacker amasses is a form of power and standing, so notoriety and fame—amongst the hacker community— are vital to most hackers. (Mainstream fame generally happens after they’re in court!) Another reason is that hacking is an intellectual challenge. Learning vulnerabilities, researching a mark, finding a hole nobody else could find—these are exercises for a technological mind.The draw that hacking has for programmers keen to accept a challenge is also evident in the number and popularity of organized competitions place on by hacker conferences and software companies. Boredom is another huge reason for hacking.

Hackers may often just look around to see what sort of forbidden things they can access. Finding a target is often a result of happening across a vulnerability, not in quest of it out in a particular place. Revenge hacking is very different.This occurs because, somewhere, somehow, somebody made the incorrect person mad. This is common for employees who were fired or laid-off and are now in quest of to show their former employer what a obtuse choice they made. Revenge hacking is probably the most perilous form of hacking for most companies, because a former employee may know the code and network intimately, amongst other forms of protected information. As an employer, the time to start worrying about someone hacking into your computer system is not after you let one of the network engineers or developers go. You must have a security plot in place long before that day ever arrives.