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Hacking Articles, Tips and Tools
Data breaches are occurring left and right, with media coverage putting them in the public eye and bringing on a culture of fear tied to cybersecurity and malicious attackers. But who are these malicious attackers? Are they truly hackers, to use the term everyone uses to describe groups and individuals behind high-profile attacks on organizations and governments?
The term “hacker” is used by the media in a derogatory sense, to describe cybercriminals, those who pose a threat to our private information. But is that accurate? The term has had its fair share of meanings throughout the years. Put simply, a hacker is someone who possesses great wealth of knowledge on programming, various computer languages, code and general computer security, and uses their skills to find vulnerabilities in computer systems with the goal of improving and patching those vulnerabilities.
It’s normal to find hackers hired by different organizations to audit their networks, perform penetration testing and conduct all kinds of cybersecurity investigations to uncover any flaws in the system.
What the media calls a hacker is usually a “cracker” — someone who uses their knowledge with malicious intent to find flaws in systems, not with the goal of improving them, but to exploit them and gain unauthorized access.
We want to reclaim this term from the media. We want to show how hackers, as security professionals, are the unsung heroes who work hard to keep everyone safe and protected against cyber criminals. In our category “Hacking”, you can read about the history of hacking”, how hacker culture came to be, our ode to white hat hackers, the differences between hackers and crackers, and of course our technical posts detailing cybercrime investigations and the best hacker tools used by security professionals, to name just a few key subjects.
Who Are Cybercriminals? The 10 Most Infamous Cybercriminals
Throughout human history, crime has been ever-present. Whether it’s burglary, theft, fraud, extortion, vandalism, or more serious offenses, it always followed us. But as technology progresses, criminals find more ways to conduct their illegal activities.
Top 9 Internet Search Engines Used by Security Researchers
We all know what internet search engines are, and why they’re used. Even when you want to search for the most mundane thing ever, you can go to Google, Bing, Safari, or any of the other traditional web browsers. But what if you need access to information not usually found on those popular search engines?
Top 10 Hacker Movies of all Time
Hollywood has a knack for influencing public opinion on many different topics. It’s been doing just that for over a century, and hackers have been no exception.
Social Engineering: What Is It? Types of Social Engineering Attacks and How to Protect Yourself from Them
With human error being the top cause of data breaches¹ in all kinds of organizations, it isn’t surprising that a type of cyber attack that exploits human psychology would be one of the most common threats to enterprise security we see.
Top 10 Cybersecurity Legends You Should Know About
Cybersecurity is growing quickly and it might seem difficult to keep up with all the latest developments and trends. But there are some trends—or better yet, people—who have left their unmistakable imprint on the history of cybersecurity.
Hacker vs Cracker: Main Differences Explained
Media coverage of data breaches is increasing rapidly, especially with the public’s watchful eye on organizations and the vulnerable systems they work with — easy targets for exploitation. However, the less-than-dramatic truth is that the frequency and scale of data breaches hasn’t really soared* in the past decade, even if people are still at great risk of having their data exposed. The media itself has brought on the hype and created a fear culture around data breaches and malicious attackers.
Exploring Google Hacking Techniques - Top Google Dorks
Some time ago we wrote an interesting post about the OSINT concept and its importance in the security researching world, showing how easy it is to get information from publicly available sources on the Internet. Last week one of our developers shared an interesting link he found — one that was exposing many supposedly “private” resources from different websites.
Top 10 Common Network Security Threats Explained
The old childhood warning “Stranger danger!” has withstood the test of time even in our modern, developed world. Now that most of our daily procedures and activities are automatized and available for use on the Internet, we need to take the same level of precaution we did as children, crossing to the other side of the street whenever we saw a suspicious stranger. This precaution is needed even more after seeing some critical statistics surface, claiming that nearly one-third of the world’s computers are infected with some type of malware.
Is WordPress Secure?
WordPress is one of the most high-profile open source CMS's in use today. Being that 60% of all CMS websites use Wordpress, and 31% of all websites on the Internet use it, it's safe to say that it's a frequent target of security exploits.
Top 15 Ethical Hacking Tools Used by Infosec Professionals
Automated tools now rule the Internet; you can find a few to make your social networks grow, others to answer emails automatically, and even bots to help your online customers. Of course, hacking has evolved too: nowadays you can find a lot of automated OSINT Tools that can help anyone with security research and intel reconnaissance in a way that just wasn’t possible twenty years ago.