What Is Hacking
Hacking is a general term that refers to gaining unauthorized access to data. The term originated in the 1960s at MIT, where members of their Tech Model Railroad Club would alter train sets in order to design and unlock functions that weren’t previously available. While there are many forms of hacking, such as physical hacking, network hacking, malware, phishing, and Trojan horses, there are also multiple types of hackers. A hacker is a term to describe someone who hacks, or gains unauthorized access to data. Hackers do these for multiple reasons, such as money or what they deem justice, and their reasons can change depending on who they are and what entity they are hacking.
The History of Hackers
As I said, there are multiple types of ways one could hack. Consequently, there ought to be multiple hackers who each operate differently. In older times, hacking was more primitive, often involving more physical hacking or social engineering than today, where a lot of the hacking happens digitally (even though physical hacking and social engineering are still really important to hacking today). In fact, reports from around two years after the founding of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone company claim that two young boys pranked callers by switching telephone lines.
The First Hacker
Often considered the first hacker in history, John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, had no fancy tools by his side. It was 1970s, and computers were a new thing, and certainly not a household item as it (mostly) is today. Nonetheless, technology was still booming, and arguably the most fundamental technology was Draper’s target: phones.
Earlier, in 1967, Draper had created a pirate radio and broadcasted a phone number where people could leave feedback for the radio. Another pirate radio owner, Danny Teresi, introduced John to the world of phone phreaks, or people who knew a lot about telephone networks and were able to use that knowledge to get free calls. Danny Teresi, who was a blind man, asked Draper to create a blue box, which was a box that could generate multiple tones and pitches, enabling phone phreaks like Danny to control telephone networks.
Draper spent time with Danny and other phreaks, using organs and cassette recordings to make free calls. He eventually met with Joybubbles, a blind phreak who could whistle at the perfect frequency to make phone calls. With this knowledge, Draper was able to find an instrument which could play that same perfect frequency, and that was a toy whistle that came inside of Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes. The whistle made sounds at a requer you of precisely 2600 hertz, which, coincidentally, was also the precise frequency which AT&T used to indicate a trunk line, or a high-capacity line that connected different telephone exchanges, was available, enabling him to make free calls at any time.
Modern Hackers
Nowadays, hackers have branched into multiple different types of hacking and attacks and tools have been scaled up to a level never seen before, going from a cereal box toy to now having dedicated operating systems and hardware that is made primarily for hacking, such as Kali Linux and Parrot OS and USB rubber duckies and the Flipper Zero.
Anonymous
Anonymous is considered by many a hacktivist group, a group of hackers that use hacking to get an agenda or idea across to people, and are probably the most mainstream group of hackers out there, representing the stereotype of hackers using the Guy Fawkes mask, which represents the best known member of the gunpowder plot from 1605, a plot to blow up the House of Lords in London. The Anonymous group usually acts on current events such as wars, national/international conflicts, anti-corporation movements, and privacy breaches.
Some of their most famous attacks include Operation Tunisia in 2010-11, where they supported the Tunisian Revolution by hacking government websites and provided technical assistance to activists, Operation Darknet in 2011, where they targeted child pornography websites, shutting them down and releasing user data, and OpISIS in 2015, where they waged cyberwar against the terrorist group.
While many view Anonymous as a group, others view it as a movement or identity that encompasses hackers who use their skills to voice concerns and opinions, even if they break laws. Finally, while it’s not certain that the original founders are still around, it is an undeniable fact that this movement has spread to thousands of people.
Kevin Mitnick
While the hackers mentioned in the article so far have usually been entities who practiced offensive hacking and attacked others, Kevin Mitnick is a different story. Throughout his life, computers had always fascinated him, leading Mitnick to discover how he could exploit them. He eventually became an expert in social engineering, as well as phreaking and computer intrusions.
Criminal History
In 1988, Mitnick was arrested for theft of software from DEC systems. At the end of his sentence, which included one year in prison and three years in probation, Mitnick cracked into Pacific Bell’s system (Pacific Bell is a telephone company owned by AT&T in California) and was caught and put in jail again.
After he left jail, Mitnick decided it would be best for him to instead of hacking from a fixed landline, he should turn to cell phones for mobile network access. However, not knowing how to code well himself, he decided to steal the cellphone-hacking software from someone who did know how to code. That person was Tsutomu Shimomura, a cybersecurity expert. Mitnick knew Shimomura wouldn’t be home on Christmas Day, so he gained access to Shimomura’s X-Terminal and downloaded the software.
Now, seeking revenge, Shimomura decided to go after Mitnick. Shimomura eventually found a copy of his software in a San-Francisco server. He decided to carefully go through the logs to look for clues on Mitnick, and eventually pinned him down to be somewhere in Raleigh, North Carolina. However, Shimomura wasn’t able to go any further than that due to Mitnick’s obscuring techniques.
By that point, the FBI, who had already put Mitnick in their most-wanted list, stepped in and helped Shimomura, who also used the help of a cellular company to eventually pin Mitnick down to a single cellular site in Raleigh, leaving only a few hundred residencies to find Mitnick.
Finally, Mitnick was found with 100 cloned cellular phone codes, a fake ID, and cloned hardware. He was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to six years in prison. A movie about the chase, Takedown, was later released in 2000.
The Comeback
After leaving prison for the third time in his life, Mitnick decided it was time he changed for good. He became an established and respected cybersecurity professional and sought-after consultant and expert.
Mitnick wrote two books exploring social engineering and system exploits, as well as became a security awareness trainer, assisting multiple companies in toughening up their systems. Unfortunately, Mitnick died on July 16th, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Six Types of Hackers
Being so that there are many hackers in the world, it’s a given that each hacker hacks for different reasons. As I mentioned in my blog article about Linux, people in the cybersecurity space have spent much time sorting hackers and have come up with six different types of hackers, represented by the color of their hat.
White Hat
White hat hackers are not the stereotypical hackers displayed in conventional media. They are hackers who do things legally and morally. A lot of them work for companies, conducting penetration tests and security analysis. These hackers never hack without the consent of who they are hacking, and they never take or sell data. An example of a white hat hacker would be Kevin Mitnick after serving his time in jail.
Black Hat
Black hat hackers are quite the opposite of white hat hackers (as the name implies). These hackers do things for their personal gain. They hack and sell people’s information in the dark web or just hack for fun, to not have to pay money for things, or to get an agenda across (as Anonymous, Mitnick, and Draper did).
Gray Hat
Gray hackers draw the blurry boundary between black hat hackers and white hat hackers. Their purpose is not to cause any harm (most of the times). While sometimes they may release data to the public, most gray hat hackers find vulnerabilities within systems using illegal or ethically questionable methods and often do so without consent, but report back to the entity they hacked to tell them about the security flaws, often for a fee. The term gray hat may also be used to describe black hat hackers who turned into white hat hackers like Mitnick.
Green Hat
Green hat hackers are just beginner hackers. These hackers usually do not know the legal or technical consequences of what they are doing and break things without knowing how to fix them. They are still learning the ins and outs of cybersecurity, have a desire to do so, and may, in the future, change hats.
Blue Hat
Blue hat hackers are hackers who seek revenge. They are wannabe hackers or skiddies (script kiddies, or kids who use online scripts to conduct harmful attacks or pretend to be a “cool” hacker) who do not actually care about learning the technicalities of cybersecurity or hacking, which sets them apart from green hat hackers, who still want to hone their hacking skills.
Red Hat
No, red hat hackers are not hackers who work at Red Hat. In fact, red hat hackers are vigilantes who go after black hat hackers aggressively. While white hat hackers do sometimes go after black hat hackers (like Tsutomu Shimomura), they will always hand over the black hat hackers to authorities. Meanwhile, red hat hackers find black hat hackers and launch a series of attacks on the black hat entity’s computers, often destroying the black hat hacker’s reputation, computer, or resources.
Conclusion
In conclusion, hacking has been a thing for multiple years, and has kept on growing. Hacking is used at multiple scales and for multiple reasons, and hackers are divided into 6 types. Hackers aren’t always bad like the media makes them seem, as only a loud minority gets popularity. From this article, you should take the following: Not all hackers are bad.