| spurgeonryan said: I thought that hacker groups like "anonymous" only hack to show the weaknesses in a system. Once those weaknesses are gone and they have made their point, they leave. Am I right? |
There are very different hackers. And Anonymous per se is no hacker-group, but there are hacker-groups that associate themselves to Anonymous, like Lulsec, Antisec and Anonypownies.
Some hackers do this to show security-breaches, like you mentioned. They are usually called white-hats. Most try to inform the owner of the hackable program, that he can repair it. Sometimes it doesn't go anywhere, so they release an exploit to make pressure - mostly it works, the bug is fixed fast. One of the most well known hackers are associated with the german Chaos Computer Club. They are well known, because they used BTX (one online system that existed before the Internet got big) to get much money from a german bank. They paid it back under big media-resonance and showed that way, that BTX is not that secure like it was advertised. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club
Some are use hacks to gain money. They are called black-hats. We usually don't ever know about them, because that would ake teir income smaller. If you don'T know you're hacked, they can get the most money from your resources. But we know that they are active - because we get spam. That are computers, that are infiltrated by malware. Spam is used to gain money. A more direct way is to access your bank-account or similar stuff.
Some hackers want to gain full access to the machine, they paid for. That is true for the game-console-hackers. They aren't white-hat-hackers, as they don't want the firm to fix the security bugs. It's more a liberal movement: I want the freedom with the machine I paid for, not the firm that produced the machine. The hackers themself usually want to start own programs, but their hacks are naturally also used for piracy. The homebrew-hackers are often asssociated with the Open-Source-Scene. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_(video_games)
The groups I mentioned before around anonymous do it mostly for fun (for the LULZ), or for political punishment (they attack targets they deem as bad).
There are governmental hackers. Most well known at the moment is the cyberwar attack against the nuclear program of Iran with Stuxnet. Probably the US and/or Israel are behind that. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
And we have paid hackers, that try to infiltrate the systems of the companby that pays them. That way they can find security problems and help to fix these.
That is for the usage of the term 'hackers' as people that infiltrate computer-systems. The term hacker has also a much broader meaning, including programmers for fun and people building own devices with other stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(term)
