Hacking: Two Sides to Every Coin

Don't trust anyone wearing a ski-mask. Source

If you have spent any amount of time on the Internet, then you have most certainly heard of the term hacking. I am willing to bet that whenever you hear about hacking, there is a very negative connotation about that word.  To many, hacking means using a computer to force your way into somewhere you are not supposed to have access to, and steal passwords, accounts, personal information, and sometimes proprietary secrets belonging to a company. I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with hackers before. About 10 years ago, I had an account on a video game service called Steam. Steam is a platform that lets you buy and download video games. One day I tried to start up the program, only to find my account information was not working. Back then my experience with computers and the Internet was very limited, so I did not know how to retrieve my account, so I ended up creating a new account. Luckily, I spent maybe a hundred dollars on games tied to that account, so it was not that much of a setback. 

What a fancy hat. Source

Now while many of us are familiar with the bad kind of hackers, known as black-hat hackers, there are other hackers, called whit-hat hackers, who use their talents to help people. Some of these people are just good Samaritans, trying to break into places with no intent on stealing anything and then letting the owners know. Others are paid consultants that are hired to find vulnerabilities in software and websites so that the developers can fix these security holes. The perfect example of the former is one that I briefly talked about one of my earlier posts, when a Palestinian computer scientist, named Khalil, discovered a vulnerability in Facebook that enabled people to post stuff on other people’s walls without having to be their friend⁽¹⁾. When he became stymied by Facebook’s IT department, he took the matter into his own hands and posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page to show off the vulnerability. After that, Facebook’s security team was able to patch up the exploit, but due to the unorthodox way of showing the exploit, Khalil was not compensated for finding the bug. I, for one, am glad that there are people like Khalil out there who find these types of exploits and do the right thing.

1. http://rt.com/news/facebook-post-exploit-hacker-zuckerberg-621/