by David Bressler

Created on: March 29, 2009   Last Updated: March 13, 2012

To answer this question fully, there are two words that need to be defined: 1. Hacking and 2. Hacker. Hacking can have many different definitions depending on who you ask and how much knowledge they have on the subject. A basic definition of hacking is the art of accessing a computer system without authorization. A hacker is a person who is very knowledgeable of computer systems, computer programming, the Internet and various networking protocols, such as the TCP/IP suite.

Hackers are not criminals at all.  The online criminals out there are not hackers; they tend to be script kiddies, just utilizing various hacking tools to vandalize websites and computers. The criminals are the crackers who steal identities and credit information for there own financial gain. There are hackers everywhere, from government security specialists to the 12-year-old kid in his room learning new technology. The one thing in common with all hackers is their love for technology and how to utilize their knowledge to create new ideas.  If it were not for hackers, a lot of the technology at are fingertips today would not exists.

So how is hacking morally wrong? It is not.

What is morally wrong are the online criminals who steal money, identities, and credit cards from people or businesses. These criminals are not hackers. They do not have the love for technology as hackers do and they can care less about it, all they want is to steal money and/or gain a name for themselves. Which is wrong. Nowadays, being online is a fun and robust experience with a lot of new technology out now, but the presence of scams, phishing sites and viruses is growing as well. We should all be aware of these online threats and know that there is a major difference between online criminals known as crackers and hackers out there.

There are also many different types of hacking, such as hardware hacking which is creating or modifying the hardware of a electronic device to make the device act in a way that was not intended, software hacking is the study of software and finding out the vulnerabilities in the code, website hacking is gaining full administrative access to all information on a website, there is even Google hacking, which is creating complex search queries to find specific information or servers that could be running vulnerable software.  Are all of these wrong?  No, they are not. If there would be no hacking, then the identification of software vulnerabilities would not be identified and overall a lot of information would not be know.

Look at any information security site; there is a lot of non-secure software out there, and it is a asset to businesses and IT professionals to know about the software that is vulnerable to certain attacks and how to fix the vulnerability before the computer gets compromised. If it was not for hacking how would we discover these vulnerabilities and be able to fix them, we wouldn't and could end up a victim of a online crime.

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