What Type of Hacker Are You?

Black hats are the bad guys, the ones that give all hackers a bad name. Black hats hack for their own personal and financial gain, with no regard to legality or moral parameters. Black hat hackers work hard to find vulnerabilities that will get them the highest payload, and they’re often very skilled at it, so it’s the white hats’ job to stay ahead of them.

White hats are known as the “good guys.” White hats use their knowledge in security to help improve systems, whether at the organization they’re employed at or through bug bounties. They’re the best at both defense and offense, because one of the white hats main struggles is staying ahead of all the other kinds of hackers.

Script kiddies is the term usually given to wannabe black-hats that don’t necessarily know what they’re doing or what their endgame is. Script kiddies are basically hackers-in-training - they could still go to the light side, but they’re headed down the path to the darkside. Their main goals are to gain a name for themselves among their fellow hackers, and they’re willing to do some risky things that they aren’t quite sure what the outcome will be.

Much like the rest of the world, there’s a group of hackers that hang somewhere between good and ‘evil’. Gray hats don’t hack for personal or financial gain like black hat hackers, yet they may hack using illegal and nefarious methods. However, instead of exploiting a database to make money, they may exploit a vulnerable database and publically disclose the data and vulnerability, as a way to ‘shame’ the organization or because they believe it’s for the better good. Or they may not use the exploit at all, either responsibly disclosing to the organization or, if they don’t like the way a company responds to their disclosure, they may publicly disclose the vulnerability.

Hacktivists hack to make a point, with the majority of concern given towards bringing to light trespasses on human rights, freedom of speech or freedom of information. The most notorious hacktivist group is Anonymous, famous for their many DDoS attacks on religious, government and corporate sites who they deemed as needing to be put in place for their transgressions. Hacktivists can operate as black hats, gray hats, and also Script Kiddies trying to get into a hacking group.