Sunday, 10 June 2012

What is Hacking?

Hacking means finding out weaknesses in a computer or computer network and exploiting them, though the term can also refer to someone with an advanced understanding of computers and computer networks. 

Disclaimer: I have never been involved with any hacking activity nor caused trouble to network administrators :). 

Firstly why do we need to know what is hacking? Surely not to impress girls, but to make sure others tech guys cant get into your network and PC. They can steal your data data, modify it or even destroy it. Bringing down a network is childs play these days. The technique which were used by SETI earlier are now used to push denial of services on various sites. The other reason for learning hacking is to ensure internally employees are not able to steal data, watch restricted contents or do something that security admins dont want them to do.

One famous hacker once wrote that ``Hackers understand something basic about computers, and that is that they can be enjoyed.  I know none who hack for money, or hack to frighten the company, or hack for anything but fun.'' Most of the IT wizards were once hackers; Bill Gates, Alan cox, Linus, Marcello, Willy, Tweedie, Kolivas etc are just to name few. For that matters, most of the kernel programmers are the best hackers. 


Mainly you can divide hacking into following types
1) Network hackers - These guys run port scans, look for services running and attack vulnerabilities in those services.
2) OS hackers - These guys look for vulnerabilities in OS and exploit those vulnerabilities to steal the data, run remote code or destroy the box.
3) Memory hackers - These guys can hack variables etc in memory and can get any data you want including changing parameters for in-memory variables.
4) Application/hardware hackers - These guys crack the application for usage, remove key, dongle or any such requirement. They can hack your Xbox, PSP, audio etc.
5) Script Kiddies - I am here :). You search, get and test. That's about it.

Will cover each topic in detail separately.

Hacking lingos



Archive: A collection of several files bundled into one file by a program such as tar or arc for shipment or archiving.
ASCII: [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. Uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer.
back door: A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers.
backward combatability: A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, and layouts are discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, formats, and layouts.
bug: An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. 
brain fart: The actual result of a braino, as opposed to the mental glitch which is the braino itself.
black hole:  When a piece of email or netnews disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a bounce message) it is commonly said to have `fallen into a black hole'.
benchmark: An inaccurate measure of computer performance. In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.
banana problem: Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close :) You know what I mean.
BASIC: A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers.
BITNET: The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen
brute force: Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying na"ive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones.
bytesexual: Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either big-endian or little-endian format
bandwidth: Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle.
baud barf: The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting
BLOB: Used by database people to refer to any random large block of bits which needs to be stored in a database
buffer overflow: What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see overrun and firehose syndrome), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.


more to come.....



what the hack, hack this, hack, hacking, what is hacking, about hacking, how to hacking, i hacked, how to be a hacker, download hack, hack download, hack a password, hack password, password hack, game hack, hacking book, hacked game, hacked games, games hacked

0 Responses to “What is Hacking?”

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)