Basics about Hackers!

[pottas]

Note: This is only for education purpose.

Definition of hackers -

Many years ago we used to call Good Programmers as Hackers.

But recently hacker has taken a new meaning — Someone who maliciously breaks into systems for personal gain. Technically, these criminals are crackers (criminal hackers). Crackers break into (crack) systems with malicious intent. They are out for personal gain: fame, profit, and even revenge. They modify, delete, and steal critical information, often making other people miserable.

What is differences between Hackers and Ethical Hackers ?

Generally we say Hackers are bad guys (or black-hat hackers) AND Ethical Hacker are good guys (or white-hat hackers ).

The terms black-hat hackers and white-hat hackers came from Western movies where the good guys wore white cowboy hats and the bad guys wore black cowboy hats.

How Hackers hack an email ?

Hackers generally follow 5 ways to hack an email -

1.Phishing – A phisher is a fake login page used to gain access to someones account. When someone logs into the fake login page, their password is sent to Hackers .

2.Brute Forcing - Brute Forcing is like guessing the password . Hackers use some Brute Force softwares and a password list[a long txt file containing words that might be
the password] and the Brute Forcer tries them all .

3.Keyloggers – A Keylogger is a program that runs invisibly in the background, recording all the keystrokes, usually saving the results to a log file and that log file will be sent to Hacker.

4.Guessing The Secret Question – If they know your Answer for the Secret Question this will be an easy task. They just Go to mail.yahoo.com (or what ever you use) and click forgot password,then put in the email address and then the CAPTCHA code, reply on the secret question. .

5.Common Sense .

Some of the famous Hackers -

Kevin David Mitnick

Adrian Lamo

Jonathan James

Robert Tappan Morris

Kevin Poulsen

Some Important Points -

• To catch theif think like theif . To catch Hackers think like Hackers .
  
• There are some Password Cracking Tools .
  
• Using some softwares like Virus Builder (I think now it's not available) any one can create Virus .
  
• Script kiddies - These are computer novices who take advantage of the
  hacker tools and documentation available for free on the Internet but
  don’t have any knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes
  
• Intermediate hackers - These halfway hackers usually know just enough
  to cause serious problems. They know about computers and networks,
  and often use well-known exploits
  
• Elite hackers - These are skilled hacking experts. These are the people
  who write many of the hacker tools, including the scripts and other pro-
  grams that the script kiddies use

I had learned all these from wiki , sites , books , dictionary etc

[prashanthpai]

There's a good movie by the name 23 which is based on true story of the legend Kevin Mitnick.

[Raymond]

Kevin Mitnick is a legent. I heard a case where he used only his phone to bring down a network. How smart is that?

[ceyfer]

Kevin Mitnick even snoop silently inside NORAD - Imagine he could control ICBM Missile defenses of US,Canada and Great Britain.

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My Portal

http://www.happyhacker.org/define.shtml
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

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[pottas]

There's a good movie by the name 23 which is based on true story of the legend Kevin Mitnick.

Movie Name = "The Number 23" ?

[prashanthpai]

Oops ! I'm sorry, I had it on my PC with the file name 23-Hackers.Movie.

The actual name of the film is "Takedown"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
It's an old movie but good one.

I have a mini SmartMovie version of it. Just 95 MB. If anyone needs it, I can PM the rapidshare link.
Posting the link here might be against the rules.

[shan]

i needs it and by the is it english

[prashanthpai]

Yes it's in English and I've pm'ed you.

[utkarsh30june]

Oops ! I'm sorry, I had it on my PC with the file name 23-Hackers.Movie.

The actual name of the film is "Takedown"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
It's an old movie but good one.

I have a mini SmartMovie version of it. Just 95 MB. If anyone needs it, I can PM the rapidshare link.
Posting the link here might be against the rules.

Well Prashanth, you know very well where to post it. Don't you? then why PMing link to everyone?

[afiraz]

There are many movie that involved hacking such as great movie Live Free or Die Hard, Matrix, Hackers Are People Too,Dream Hackers, Hackers and etc. It is very difficult to be a hackers unless you are very smart and creative.