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What is Hacking?

Hacking is a term that is mostly associated with malicious and Illegal activities. It may be that you have heard a lot about it in the news and social media that someone’s e-mail account has been hacked, or the bank’s website has been stolen and many information stolen.

All this is entirely possible because we are in a world where everyone uses the Internet, no information is private.

Hacking is not illegal in itself if it is done with good intentions. For example, to help a company, its system or network can check the security, hacking is not illegal.

Neatness in hacking matters a lot. If there is no reason to harm anyone or anyone’s property, hacking is not illegal.

A person who hacks with bad intentions and causes serious harm, he is known as a cracker and he is not a hacker, therefore, hacking and cracking are very different.

In simple language, if someone hacks into the network to point out the flaws in the system, then it is called hacking.

Even if a person breaks the system without permission, even then it is not considered invalid, because the main purpose behind this hacking is to point out security flaws so that they can be fixed.

A cracker is a person who enters the system to steal or cause a loss. This is done with bad intentions, and in most cases, crackers leave malware in the system and create problems and steal information.

Read more :) https://www.oxipress.com/everything-about-hacking/

Top comments (4)

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Actually, hacking has nothing implicitly to do with break-ins, even benevolently-motivated ones. From Jargon File...


hacker: n

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

  1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

  2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

  3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.

  4. A person who is good at programming quickly.

  5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)

  6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.

  7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.


What you're describing is known as an infosec hacker - specifically, a hacker who specializes in computer security; otherwise, if they're criminals, they are (as you correctly identified), crackers.

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jayzyme profile image
John Barron

Hackers in general are not bad they pride them selves on their skills and strive to learn everything they can about anything to do with computers. Crackers on the other hand usually do bad things like crack codes, passwords, security systems to gain entry into systems for malicious intentions.

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