Wait! Is There Any Difference Between Hacking and Cracking?

INTRODUCTIONS

Hacking and cracking are two words that are often used when it comes to privacy and copyright breaches. More than often they are erroneously used in place of each other. One reason could be because they both end with a similar sound, or ‘acking’ and they’re both malicious forms of cyber activity. However they have different meanings.

In this article, we will be making clarifications between this two words, hacking and cracking.

WHAT IS HACKING?

Hacking, in computer vocabulary, is the act of stealing personal or private data, without the owner’s knowledge or consent. It could also include other things like stealing passwords, creating a bot net, or pretty much any act that breaches someone’s privacy, without their knowledge, or consent.

WHAT IS CRACKING?

Cracking is when you edit a program’s source code, or you could create a program, like a key generator (more commonly known as a ‘keygen’), patch, or some sort of application that tricks an application in to thinking that a particular process has occurred. For example, a key generator and a patch for the Adobe Master Collection would trick the software in to thinking that the key entered is correct, and not let it verify the key with the Adobe master server. Cracking is pretty much looking for a back door in software, and exploiting it for malicious use or for a copyright breaching act.

MORE ON DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HACKER AND CRACKER

To be clearer, the difference is that a hacker is someone that uses their extensive knowledge of computer logic and code for malicious purposes, while a cracker – looks for back doors in programs, and exploits those back doors. Cracking is generally less harmful than Hacking. Hackers are usually involved with web related Hacking, like MySQL interception, or phishing, other forms of Hacking would include things like brute force, or password lifting.

One thing is clear though, both are malicious but one is more malicious than the other. Crackers usually have an extensive knowledge in code related to Python and .NET (Visual Basic, C, C++, C#) and Objective C (Mac), while hackers are fluent in different forms of web code, like PHP, MySQL, Java Script , Ajax, and HTML and CSS.

CONCLUSION

The difference is clear in what they do, that is a cracker and hacker. They may sound the same but what they do are different. The skills you need to learn before you can become any of them are different too.

The post [Wait! Is There Any Difference Between Hacking and Cracking?](https://blog.tuplea.com.ng/wait-is-there-any-difference-between-hacking-and-cracking/) first appeared on [Tuplea ICT Concepts Blog](https://blog.tuplea.com.ng).