The advancement of information technology spans a lot of areas of our lives. Information technology has made a huge difference in industry, agriculture and services. This in turn boosts up the productivity of the society. However, the development of computer technology also leads to many security problems in our modern society. There has emerged a group of computer savvy people who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network. Their motivation has put many questions on debating table. On the one hand, many people contend that a hacker is a dangerous person who will probably destroy the whole world’s computer system. On the other hand, others argue that hackers are not dangerous and not causing harm. This essay will discuss the two sides of the coin with regard to hackers with relevant examples.
First of all, the definition of hacking and hackers need to be clearly understood so as to have an insight into hacking. Hacking can be defined as any kind of computer crimes. Pirating is the most popular form of hacking, which relates to the stealing information from written software programmes. In the computer security context, hackers are people who try to find the weaknesses of the computer network and exploit the information from software. Hackers may be encouraged by a variety of reasons, for instance profits, protests, or challenges. Hackers can be categorised into the three types, which are black hats, grey hats, and white hats. Black hat group or cracker is expertise in carrying out the harmful to the computer system. A grey hat is a hacking group that will not violate the law and help the government to defend the system. However, grey hat will apply the same methods to revert to black hat approaches. The white hat hacker has their own abilities and professional computing skills to protect the malicious threads and
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