From the course: Cybersecurity Awareness: Cybersecurity Terminology

Who are the adversaries?

From the course: Cybersecurity Awareness: Cybersecurity Terminology

Who are the adversaries?

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- The word criminal is a familiar term which means someone participating in nefarious behavior. So now let's align that with cybersecurity and then what we get is a cybercriminal, which is an individual that is conducting this malicious behavior via computers, networks, and even the internet. There is a high likelihood that you have heard the term hacker used most frequently when describing the bad guy. However, that term has many meanings beyond just the negative connotation so often associated with it. What you may not know is there are variety of different hackers, including black hat, white hat, and gray hat hackers. Let's start with the good guys or the white hat hacker. These are the people that look for vulnerabilities and exploit them for the purpose of reporting them to be fixed. Therefore, what they do, while it may seem questionable, is actually done with good intent. You may hear white hat hackers referred to as ethical hackers. They are often employed by an organization to find their areas of exploit before the bad guys do. The opposite of black is white and the opposite of ethical is unethical and this is exactly how a black hat hacker would be described in the most simple of terms. Black hat hackers find vulnerabilities for their own gain, whether it be money, fame, notoriety, or something else. They illegally go around security controls to find vulnerabilities and exploit them before a company can discover what has been done. These are the cybercriminals companies are working to protect themselves against. When you think of a Venn diagram and one circle is black, the other is white, and in the middle where they overlap, would then be the gray. This is a good visual demonstration of what a gray hat hacker is. They are somewhere in between white and black. They may hack into networks to find vulnerabilities without permissions, which is technically illegal. But then, instead of leveraging what they found for their own personal gain, they would report it to the company to help them out in the end, which is a gray area, hence the name. So the next time you hear the word hacker, remember that it doesn't always have the negative connotation that is typically tied to it. As we defined here, there are hackers that are good, bad, and everything in between.

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