Ethical Hackers vs. Malicious hackers

It is important to know the difference between an ethical hacker & a malicious hacker ( also know as crackers)

Ethical hacker as we already know is a person who hacks system to find vulnerabilities and secure them.On the other hand, a  malicious hacker or a cracker hacks  system to take control over it.There are mainly two reasons because of which a person could hack a system -

For fun - Yes , a malicious hackers will hack a  system and then boast about it in front of friends.

For Some benefit- Benefits ranging from financial to personal. A malicious hacker could hack into a credit card transcation processing server to get a list of credit card numbers & use them in a financial fraud.

Please keep in mind, malicious hackers are criminals & hacking someone’s system without his/her consent is a legal offense punishable under law.

In modern parlance , the hacker ethic is either:

The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical  duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible; and/or

The belief that system cracking for fun and exploration is ethically acceptable as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.

 

Both of these normative ethical principles are widely,but by no means universally,accepted among hackers.The first and arguably the second,emerged from the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory during the ’60s and ’70s.