So what are we doing when we are engaging in ethical hacking?
Well, let's back up for a moment here.
What are we doing when we're engaged in just hacking?
Before we talk about ethical hacking.
What the heck is hacking?
And what are these categories of hackers that we hear so much about?
Well, hacking in our sense of the word.
I mean, one of the reasons this is tricky and one of the reasons we need to discuss this is because
the word hack in the English language has taken on many different subtleties.
For instance, I could be working on maybe securing my bicycle helmet to my handlebars and I could come
up with a hack to do that.
So that's kind of a workaround.
Now, how we're going to be using the word hack is very, very specific.
We're going to be using it in a cyber security sense.
So when we talk about hacking from a cyber security sense, it ain't good, right?
So the example I gave of oh yeah, a hack little outfitted holder for my bicycle helmet.
My goodness.
Could I be giving any nerdier of an example, by the way?
I guess I could be talking about my Lego addiction right now, so we're lucky.
But anyways, seriously, hacking here is not good.
It refers to exploiting vulnerabilities and gaining unauthorized access to resources.
And notice it's probably going to go farther than that.
Right.
Exploiting vulnerabilities, getting access to resources, and then stealing those resources or defacing
those resources or deleting those resources or encrypting those resources and asking for a ransom.
So, yeah, hacking in our definition is not a good thing.
And now you can immediately see why we like to distinguish this between ethical hacking, because we're
going to be doing hacking for the forces of good.
And if you're really new to this discipline, you might think to yourself, well, wait a minute, if
hacking is bad and ethical hacking is good, how can we possibly make this a good thing?
How can it be good to exploit vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access to resources?
Well, hold on, because we'll be getting there and you'll know the specific types of activities that
you're going to be performing as an ethical hacker in an enterprise environment.
Now, don't be upset if you've heard some category of hacker, maybe in someone else's course.
And, you know, you're wondering why it's not getting mentioned here.
The categories of hackers that I'm going to give you are those as defined by the EEC Council and we
know they're the big force behind one of the most popular exams in this discipline and that is the Certified
Ethical Hacker Exam.
So these are their official categories.
Mileage may vary.
If you're looking at someone else's list, but we can all agree on these.
I hope we categorize the bad guys as black hats.
That's right.
So when there is someone hacking a cybersecurity environment, we immediately can say, are they a black
hat or are they a white hat?
Are they for the forces of evil, the black hat hackers, or are they the forces of good, the white
hat hackers?
And what if you have someone that is spending a little bit of time under each discipline?
Well, there's a word for that.
Mixed black and white.
And you get grey.
We have grey hats.
Yeah, sure.
They may moonlight for the, you know, cyber security intelligence agency by evening and by day, they're
actually as part of maybe a hacktivists type activity.
They're actually breaking into a system to take some company down.
Notice it's a big grey area there.
They are doing things that would be considered illegal.
At the same time, they're helping with legal hacking at the same time.
One of the scariest.
It's supposed to sound this scary.
One of the scariest hackers we can have is a suicide hacker.
What does this mean?
It means that they simply do not care about getting caught.
Think about how dangerous that is.
They do not care about getting caught.
I immediately think of someone that is in an unauthorized secured area of a massive data center.
Let's say they are, you know, right there where there's just billions of dollars worth of cloud services
that are provided and they torch the place.
They just take a flamethrower to all of those servers.
Boy, a mine negative today.
Well, anyways, you get the idea.
They are just going to destroy the data and they just don't care about getting caught.
Really scary.
Now, on the total opposite of that is those like maybe you and I, when we first start in this discipline,
we are downloading tools that we might not know a lot about, and we are attempting to use those tools.
When you don't really have full awareness of what you're up to, we put you in the script kiddie category
and hey, look, we all started out as script kiddies.
It's not it didn't sell.
Okay, let's get back into the real serious threat.
And that's cyber terrorism.
We have to understand that there are terrorist organizations now that are targeting cyber security attacks,
ones that will have huge implications.
And this is a growing area of concern for us.
Thanks to the Internet of Things, as more and more devices gain intelligence, as more and more devices
connect to a network, more and more devices are susceptible to cyber attacks.
And think about it.
When you have devices that are controlling things like transportation and major pieces of infrastructure,
this is a huge deal.
It's one of the reasons many of you are listening to my voice right now, maybe even your president
of your country has begged you to start studying cybersecurity so you can be one of the good guys against
these threats.
And I'm not exaggerating state sponsored hackers.
So there is a government that is saying, hey, we're hiring you to go attack them.
And that's happening all of the time.
Now that is simply commonplace.
So I hope you appreciate now what we mean by hacking.
It's not good, by the way.
How can I forget hacktivists?
I mentioned them a moment ago.
That is indeed another category of hacker.
So I want to thank you for and if I didn't fully define that a hacktivist is someone that is attacking
illegally the, you know, data and the data resources of an organization and they're not authorized
and they're supposedly doing it for forces of good.
So maybe there's some organization that is found to be cruel to animals.
And so now they're going to bring down their Web servers all over the world as a way to say, hey,
they're harming animals and we want to gain notoriety for their harm of animals.
You get the idea.
So hacktivists would be kind of the opposite of like a suicide attacker who's trying to do as much damage
as they possibly can and, you know, have no fear of getting caught.
So I hope you have a new appreciation for this word hack in our sense of the term.
It's not good.
That's why we have to distinguish between blackhat hackers and white hat hackers.
We're going to be having a lot more to say about the white hat hackers in this particular module, of
course.
We're are going to talk about ethical hacking and what it truly means.
So you have that to look forward to as well.
Thanks for joining me, though, in this important video.