The Business Of Hacking

Hacking, as we know, is present in our society. From time to time, we see on the news how a website or a database was hacked and passwords or even some credit cards information have been stolen. All of these events affect our communities and make us wonder how safe we are from a cyber-attack, after all, all of important data like our social security number are stored on databases. Even government agencies have suffered this intrusion from a hacker that has put at risk the safety of its citizens. How it all did begin and how it affects our society?

Hacking started out of curiosity around the 1970(Bowles). Hackers, who were called “phreak-ers” around that time, were among the brightest people. One of their main goals was to learn how the phone system worked, and try to use it for their benefit. One of the famous phreakers of that era was called “Captain Crunch”, he discovered that he could bypass the normal mechanism of the AT&T phone network and make international phone calls.

With the technology boom that occurred at the beginning of this century, hackers were divided into two groups, white hat and black hat hackers. Black hat hackers “can be characterized as people, groups, criminal organizations, governments and military with malicious intent.” The white hat hackers are the opposite of black hackers, they work in making databases and other penetrable systems secure and not accessible for black hat hackers. What drives hackers to become black hat? Most of the times, the reasons people decide to become black hat hackers are financial gain, trying to damage the image of a certain politician or because they want to be well known by society. Even hacking can be used to fight a war, for example some hackers targeted the Iranian nuc...

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... of this events, there have been many discussions wether the government should control the internet in order to prevent protests and riots.

In the example above, the internet was used for an unethical cause. Internet was used to coordinate and motivate people to cause commotion among the citizens. The dilemma now is how we protect the internet from these unethical usages. Social turmoil can be easily dispersed through the internet and it can cause damage to properties or even the physical safety of a citizen. That is why, even governments that are liberal are starting to think about controlling the internet because problems in the society can stir development backwards, specially social meadias.

Works Cited

Bowles, Matt. “The Business Of Hacking And Birth Of An Industry.” Bell Labs Technical Journal 17.3(2012): 5-16. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Dec. 2013