INTRODUCTION

In common usage, a Hacker is a person who breaks into computers, usually by gaining access
to administrative controls. The subculture that has evolved around hacker’s is often referred
to as the computer underground. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political
ends, and are often unconcerned about the use of illegal means to achieve them.
Other uses of the word hacker exist that are not related to computer security (Computer
programmer & Home computer hobbyists), but these are rarely used by the mainstream
media. Some would argue that the people that are now considered hackers are not hackers, as
before the media described the person who breaks into computers as a hacker there was a
hacker community. This community was a community of people who had a large interest in
computer programming, often creating open source software. These people now refer to the
cyber-criminal hackers as "crackers".

DEFINITION
 Definition
The Jargon File, a compendium of hacker slang, defines Hacker as "A person who enjoys
exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to
most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum
necessary.” The Request for Comments (RFC) 1392, the Internet Users' Glossary,
amplifies this meaning as "A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the
internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular."These hackers
are disappointed by the mass media and mainstream public's usage of the word Hacker to
refer to security breakers, calling them "Crackers" instead.
The difference between hackers and crackers, according to them, is that where hackers use
their skills and knowledge to learn more about how systems and networks work, crackers will
use the same skills to author harmful software (like viruses, Trojans ,etc.) and illegally
infiltrate secure systems with the intention of doing harm to the system. This subculture of
hackers doesn't participate in these activities and generally frowns upon them.

 The Advent of Hacking

THE ADVENT OF HACKING
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961,
the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. The Signals and Power Committee of MIT's Tech
Model Railroad Club adopted the machine as their favourite tech-toy and invented
programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is still recognizably with us
today. These early years have been examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book Hackers
[Levy].
MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The Tech
Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory; the world's leading centre of AI research into the early 1980s.Their influence was
spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPA net.
The ARPA net was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. It was built by
the Defence Department as an experiment in digital communications, but grew to link
together hundreds of universities and defence contractors and research laboratories. It enabled
researchers everywhere to exchange information with unprecedented speed and flexibility,
giving a huge boost to collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and
intensity of technological advance.
But the ARPA net did something else as well. Its electronic highways brought together
hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead of remaining in isolated smallgroups each
developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves
as a networked tribe.
The first intentional artefacts of the hacker culture—the first slang lists, the first satires, the
first self-conscious discussions of the hacker ethic—all propagated on the ARPA net in its
early years. In particular, the first version of the Jargon File developed as a cross-net
collaboration during 1973–1975. This slang dictionary became one of the culture's defining
documents. It was eventually published as "The Hacker's Dictionary" in 1983; that first
version is out of print, but a revised and expanded version is New Hacker's Dictionary
[Raymond].
Hackerdom flowered at the universities connected to the net, especially (though not
exclusively) in their computer science departments. MIT's AI and LCS labs made it first
among equals from the late 1960s. But Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (SAIL) and Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) became nearly as important. All
were thriving centres of computer science and AI research. All attracted bright people who
contributed great things to the hacker culture, on both the technical and folkloric levels

HACKING: A PROGRAMMER SUBCULTURE

A Hacker is a member of the computer programmer subculture originated in
the1960s in the United States academia, in particular around the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory. Nowadays, this subculture is mainly associated with the free
software movement.
Hackers follow a spirit of creative playfulness and anti-authoritarianism, and
Some times use this term to refer to people applying the same attitude to other
fields.
 ETHICS AND PRINCIPLES

Many of the values and tenets of the free and open source software movement stem
from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT and at the Homebrew Computer Club.
The so-called Hacker Ethics were chronicled by Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of
the Computer Revolution and in other texts.
Before communications between computers and computer users was as networked
as it is now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker subcultures, often
unaware or only partially aware of each others' existence. All of these had certain
important traits in common:

 Creating software and sharing it with each other

 Placing a high value on freedom of inquiry; hostility to secrecy

 Information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy

 Upholding the right to fork

  Emphasis on rationality

 Distaste for authority

 Playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and their humour seriously

These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at academic settings such as

college campuses. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of
California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University were particularly well-known
hotbeds of early hacker culture. They evolved in parallel, and largely unconsciously,
until the Internet, where a legendary PDP-10 machine at MIT, called AI, that was
running ITS, provided an early meeting point of the hacker community. This and
critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and
systematic ethos. Symptomatic of this evolution were an increasing adoption of
common slang and a shared view of history, similar to the way in which other
occupational groups have professionalized themselves but without the formal
credentialing process characteristic of most professional groups.

Over time, the academic hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious,
more cohesive, and better organized. The most important consciousness-raising
moments have included the composition of the first Jargon File in 1973, the
promulgation of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the publication of The Cathedral
And the Bazaar in 1997. Correlated with this has been the gradual election of a set of
Shared culture heroes: Bill Joy, Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay,
KenThompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Guido Van
Rossum, among others.
The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly been
driven by the commoditization of computer and networking technology, and has in
turn accelerated that process. In 1975, hackerdom was scattered across several
different families of operating systems and disparate networks; today it is largely a
UNIX and TCP/IP phenomenon, and is concentrated around various operating
systems based on free software and open-source software development.

Artifacts and customs

The academic hacker subculture is defined by shared work and plays focusedaround
central artifacts. Some of these artifacts are very large; the Internet, theWorld Wide
Web, the GNU Project, and the Linux kernel are all hacker creations,works of which
the subculture considers itself primary custodian.
The academic hacker subculture has developed a rich range of symbols that serve
as
recognition symbols and reinforce its group identity. GNU's Gnu,the BSD Daemon,
Tux, the Linux penguin, and the Perl Camel standout as examples. The use of the
glider structure from Conway'sGame of Life as a general Hacker Emblem has been
proposed byEric S. Raymond.
The academic hacker subculture has an annual ceremonial day—
Aprilfool’s. There is a long tradition of perpetrating elaborate jokes, hoaxes,
pranksand fake websites on this date, which includes the publication of the annual
joke RFC.

 Hacker Attitude
Several subgroups of the computer underground with different attitudes and
aimsuse different terms to demarcate themselves from each other, or try to exclude
somespecific group with which they do not agree. Eric S. Raymond advocates
thatmembers of the computer underground should be called crackers. Yet, those
peoplesee themselves as hackers and even try to include the views of Raymond in
what theysee as one wider hacker culture, a view harshly rejected by Raymond
himself. Insteadof a hacker– cracker dichotomy, they give more emphasis to a
spectrum of different categories, such as white hat (ethical hacking), grey hat, black
hat and script kiddie.In contrast to Raymond, they usually reserve the term cracker to
refer to black hathackers, or more generally hackers with unlawful intentions.

 White Hat
A white hat hacker breaks security for non-malicious reasons, for instance testing
their own security system. This type of hacker enjoys learning and working with
computer systems, and consequently gains a deeperunderstanding of the subject.
Such people normallygo on to use their hacking skills in legitimate ways,such as
becoming security consultants. The word'hacker' originally included people like
this, althougha hacker may not be someone into security.

Black Hat:

A black hat hacker, sometimes called "cracker", is someone who breaks computer
security without authorization or uses technology (usually a computer, phone
system or network) for vandalism, credit card fraud, identity theft, piracy, or
other types of illegal activity.
  Grey Hat
A grey hatted hacker is a hacker of ambiguous ethics and/or borderline legality, often
frankly admitted

 Script Kiddie

A script kiddie is a non-expert who breaks into computer systems by using pre-
packaged automated tools written by others, usually with little understanding.
These are theoutcasts of the hacker community.

 Hacktivist
A hacktivist is a hacker who utilizes technology to announce a social, ideological,
religious, or political message. In general, most hacktivism involves website
defacement or denial-of-service attacks. Inmore extreme cases, hacktivism is used as
tool for Cyber terrorism. Hacktivists are alsoknown as Neo Hacker

o Hacker Group
The computer underground is supported by regular real-world gatherings called
hacker conventions or "hacker cons". These drawn many people every year including
SummerCon (Summer), DEF CON, HoHoCon (Christmas), ShmooCon (February),
BlackHat, Hacker Halted, and H.O.P.E. They have helped expand the definition and
solidify the importance of the computer underground.

 METHODS OF HACKING

A typical approach in an attack on Internet-connected system is:

1. Network enumeration: Discovering information about the intended target.

2. Vulnerability analysis: Identifying potential ways of attack.

3. Exploitation: Attempting to compromise the system by employing the

vulnerabilities found through the vulnerability analysis

In order to do so, there are several recurring tools of the trade and techniques used by
computer criminals and security experts.

o Security exploit
A security exploit is a prepared application that takes advantage of a
known weakness. Common examples of security exploits are SQL injection,
Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery which abuse security
holes that may result from substandard programming practice. Other
exploits would be able to be used through FTP, HTTP, PHP, SSH, Telnet
and some web-pages. These are very common in website/domain hacking .