The activity carried out by hackers that are aimed to compromise digital devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, or entire networks is called hacking. However, hacking may not always be involved for hostile purposes; currently, most hackers and hacking is characterized as unlawful by cybercriminals. The act of hacking is mostly motivated based on protest, financial gain, spying, information gathering, or just fun challenges.
Types of hacking:
The nature of the hacking process is typically technical. However, nowadays, hackers use psychological tricks to manipulate users into clicking on a spiteful attachment. This leads users to provide their data. These tactics are known by the term “social engineering.”
Moreover, hacking characteristics can be considered an overarching umbrella term for acts behind most malicious and malware cyberattacks. For instance, cyber attacks on businesses, the computing public, and governments.
There are three reasons why hackers attempt to break into networks and computers in broader terms. These include:
- One of the most significant reasons is the financial gain for hackers. Such as stealing credit card numbers or hacking into banking systems.
- Secondly, burnishing someone’s reputation within a hacker’s culture and gaining street cred is why they prefer to hack. These actions lead to leaving the hacker's mark on websites they vandalize.
- The third is corporate espionage. This includes a company’s hackers stealing another competitor’s product or service information to gain the market edge.
Source for hackers to rely on:
Apart from personal ingenuity, computer code is also one of the major sources hackers rely on. There is a huge hacker community on the internet, but only a few are aware of program code. For this reason, various hackers download codes written unboundedly.
Additionally, thousands of programs are used by hackers to explore networks and computers, which gives hackers the authority over organizations and users. Once a hacker understands the system process, he can exploit it by designing programs.
They use malicious programs to:
Hack passwords:
Someone’s password can be easily hacked in various ways, including algorithms with a combination of numbers, symbols, or letters to educated guesses. Brute force attack defines the trial and error method of password hacking, which means that they will try various combinations to gain access. Further, a dictionary attack is another way to gain access, including a program that uses common words to log into password fields.
In addition, computer systems can be infected with a virus which are programs made to duplicate themselves and cause a range of problems such as wiping out everything to crashing a computer.
Log keystrokes:
Some programs enable them to view each keystroke made by the computer user. If installed on a victim’s computer, the program gives hackers an advantage to steal someone’s identity by recording each stroke.
Backdoor access gain for hackers:
Various hackers develop programs that look out for unprotected pathways into computers and network systems, similar to hacking passwords. In the initial internet days, various computers had limited security, making it easy for them to get into the systems without passwords or usernames.
