Nowadays, hacking has become widespread especially with the exponential growth of portable mobile devices like laptops, smartphones, tablets etc. News related to data breaches and hacked systems appear every other day in the media. Not just individuals, large organizations are also under the radar of hackers especially when money is involved like banking information.
As we all know, hacking is the art of gaining unauthorized access to target’s system or device for extracting information. Hackers are of various types like whitehat hackers, grayhat hackers and blackhat hackers. This post talks about the most dangerous and disruptive ones, referred to as blackhat hackers.
What is Blackhat Hacking
- Blackhat hacking is the act of compromising and gaining control of a system for personal gains or specific agenda.
- Aim of blackhat hacking is to steal or sometimes modify the data especially financial information from underlying systems.
- Sometimes as a part of agenda, the underlying data is destroyed or made unusable. This is usually done as part of sponsored attacks by competitors, states or nations.
- Data obtained from blackhat hacking is sometimes also sold in underground web markets, known as dark web for driving huge income.
Who is a Blackhat Hacker
- Blackhat hackers are highly technically skilled professionals with advanced knowledge of operating system (Linux/windows/Mac) internals.
- These hackers possess up-to-date information on the vulnerabilities and loopholes for target systems.
- They constantly devise new advanced and unknown methods of hacking given systems and devices. Such attack vectors, commonly referred to as zero-day vulnerabilities are yet to be found by the device/software manufacturers as well. Hence exploiting them gives sure shot results.
- Usually motivated by financial gains or sponsored attacks.
- Also referred to as crackers sometimes as they crack the deployed security controls intentionally for personal gains.
- Blackhat hackers are often part of state sponsored cyber terrorism, cyber warfare and cyber espionage activities.
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