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The Psychological Profile of a Hacker With Emphasis on Security Awareness

The term “hacker” is a little vague.

For instance, it is usually derogatory when actually there are “good” hackers too, ethical hackers whose job it is to find system and network vulnerabilities. According to Tech Worm, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were hackers before founding Apple. In their youth, they hacked into telephone networks to make free calls.

There are also enough user-friendly, open-source hacking tools on the Internet that nuisance hackers can master quite easily. This type of hacker is called a green hat or script kiddie.

And there are hackers who are motivated by love (or loss of it), money and ideology.

In this article, we will look at the motivations of different hacker types, and at how hacker profiling and breach forensics can help organizations beef up their cybersecurity and increase security awareness.    

15 Hacker Types – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hackers can be divided into several types. Their motives vary widely, from the terrorist hacker wanting to save the planet to the script kiddie wanting to destroy their ex-spouse. Here are fifteen of the best-known families of hackers.

  1. Gray hats: Aligned somewhere between the black hats and white hats, these hackers are not bent on destruction or in the game for personal gain. Nevertheless, they operate unethically. They typically find a security flaw in an organization and then disclose the vulnerability publicly.  
  2. Black hats: The stereotypical cybercriminal, aka “cracker.”
  3. Blue Teams: Not strictly hackers in the conventional sense, Blue Teams consist of ethical hackers (white hats and sometimes gray hats)  working to defeat attackers and secure the organization’s environment. Blue and Red Teams often work together.
  4. Red Teams: A team of ethical hackers acting as though they are black hats by pretending they are criminals (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from InfoSec Resources authored by Penny Hoelscher. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infosecResources/~3/b94OUGPtF_c/