One of the questions that we keep receiving from businesses and others is why hackers hack? Which are the benefits they get from doing? Is it about money? And ego, right? In general, hackers are categorized into three groups, based on their hacking motives:
- Black Hat Hackers: Black hat hackers are known to penetrate by developing and distributing malware into networks and systems. They are most often called by other individuals as the ‘evil hackers.’ Monetary benefits usually drive them, but they only do it for fun on other occasions. Anyone can be a black hat hacker from amateurs to professional cybercriminals as long as they hack intending to spread malware and steal personal data.
- White Hat Hackers: Not all hackers are evil; there are hackers in white hats too. Commonly known as ethical hackers, white hat hackers are frequently hired to test for flaws in protection by companies and government agencies. To ensure the security measures are in place, they incorporate widely recognized cybersecurity strategies such as penetration testing and comprehensive vulnerability assessments. They are also hired to recover personal accounts such as social media accounts (e.g., Instagram) thus being called an Instagram account hacker.
- Grey Hat Hackers: These hackers have features of black and white hat hackers, but they usually do their hacking tasks without obtaining permission from anyone. They often report the vulnerabilities found to the parties concerned but also claim compensation in return. When not adequately compensated, they can still be leveraging the vulnerabilities.
The list is incredibly long when it comes to hacking techniques. Nonetheless, we will just be talking about some of the most widely used threat actors techniques:
- Phishing is an internationally recognized hacking technique where a hacker produces a copy of any web page to steal the user’s money or personal data.
- UI Redress. UI redress is a hacking technique similar to Phishing in which a hacker produces a false or secret user interface with some inappropriate content.
- Denial of service (DoS\DDoS). DoS or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is one of the most common types of attacks used to disable or crash a server. It is usually achieved by hackers sending loads of requests from servers through bots.
- DNS Spoofing. The hackers use DNS spoofing or DNS cache poisoning to corrupt DNS servers and redirect internet traffic to a specific yet fake website.
- SQL Injection. Using this method, hackers insert malicious code in SQL statements and are able to access sensitive databases and manipulate them.