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First of all, I would say “No,” because computer hacking is an act of manipulating a computer to do what you want it to do and it’s a very valuable skill in the Tech world. Actually, that’s not a criminal activity. You can sit in your home and hack your own computer legally.
The only situation when it becomes a crime is based on the intent or motive of the person sitting behind the computer.
Whenever most people hear someone is a Hacker, the first thing that comes to mind is the person is a criminal. He/She must be responsible for some of those malicious emails in their inbox. But, that’s a very wrong ideology in generalizing a Computer Hacker.
Asking if Computer hacking is a criminal activity is like asking: “Is it a crime for a Policeman to hold a gun?”
It only becomes a crime when the Policeman starts killing innocent people with that gun on street like his Playing Call Of Duty. And, that policeman will face justice for sure, right? But, if the police uses that same gun to kill an armed robber who’s a threat on the street, it’s not a crime because the police has the authority to do so.
The same analogy can be applied to Computer Hacking. If prior rights and authority have been given by the owner of a computer infrastructure to hack and find security Vulnerabilities/Weakness, there’s no crime because you’ve been giving prior authority to do so.
So, who are the Criminals?
The cyber criminals are those hackers who have not been given any rights and authority to hack a computer infrastructure. There aim is to find security Vulnerabilities/Weakness in computer infrastructure and human behavior, then exploit/hack them for different aims, objectives and goals.
And, that’s what brings about different classifications of computer hackers based on their skills and intent.
I may have changed some of your ideologies about computer Hackers after reading this post to the end. So, now you know all hackers are not Cyber criminals.
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I strongly agree with this…
I had to laugh how you defined ‘Script Kiddies’, mind you it’s all true! They don’t even know how to change their real IP address. I used to have to deal with the ‘sql injections’ that were made public on forums. A few backdoors were also left in various places, but when you know certain scripts off the top of your head, I had a script that used a checksum on files and directories, so it was simple to find their backdoors!
Some I even played games with, encoding their base64 code and change the MD5 hashed password to let them back in, I used to change it, and some further PHP code to grab more of their details, it was still encoded back to base64, but it used to take them ages trying to get back in a backdoor that their password no longer worked on! 🙂
By the way, nice article!
Thanks!
Hacking as such is certainly not illegal or criminal unless it is being done to gain or break something without authority.
So, I think you’re basically saying that “Intent” is the qualifier for the activity to be considered illegal. i.e. Driving a car is not illegal, driving a car to hit pedestrians is. — Shooting a firearm isn’t illegal, but shooting a firearm into a crowd of people certainly is.
You don’t get to be a hacker without being a smart man. Even the best of us miss some pretty obvious mistakes. But please, please use a grammar/spell checking tool next time. Grammarly isn’t a bad plugin, far from perfect, as it missed a bunch of randomly capitalized words in your article, but it’s at least a second set of eyes looking over your shoulder.
Thank you very much I really appreciate your feedback. Will work on it