by David Pickett

Created on: July 17, 2008   Last Updated: December 21, 2010

Hackers and how they work is an interesting subject. For many people, hackers are spotty teenagers inside their rooms all day writing dodgy viruses and attempting to gain access to all your personal files and information. Whilst this may describe a few hackers, many are well educated people who see the potential in someone else's stuff.

Hacking can be very easy but in certain cases can be extrememly hard. To get into the MOD Defence system or the Microsoft Servers requires a level of skill that only one or two people in the world have. This makes hackers very highly paid if experienced enough. Hacking can be pure maths with a bit of common sense thrown in. If you can't do maths, then hacking is something that should not be attempted, even legal hacking. It requires the use of numbers and manipulation as well as probability.

However, some hacking is very straight forward and just requires a bit of web know-how, something that can be picked up easily. Computer hackers are mainly people who do small little hacks every day but do not progress to larger hacking 'challenges'. Instead of trying for 12 hours to hack into one computer they do a quick scan of the internet between certain port numbers and IP addresses and see if they can find a few computers which let them in straight away. A lot of people have no firewall system in place and hackers can simply walk in without any checks or without your knowing about it. It is a waste of time to try to hack one computer with a firewall than easily gaining access to over 100 and getting whatever is stored on them.

Although it is often assumed that anyone can be a victim of a hack, it is mainly those who do not put anything between the hacker and their personal files on their computers. Despite this, some people will try to crack your protection and keep going until they have done this but that is rare. A hacker does not want to sit for hours on end fidling about with different programs, they just want to get to the password page and use a simple program to guess the password in 5 minutes, which is easily possible.

So you know about how hackers work but what can you do to protect yourself? Well, get a firewall and update it regulary, some firewalls even let you track back to  the hackers so you can see where they are coming from. Also if you have Wirelss Internet, which is on the rise, then it is wise to try to use a very long and impossible to guess password. If your system allows it use symbols as well e.g. 1hjiky&*%mn()_/*mng!" These passwords can take years to crack and hackers will not waste their time with them.

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