Cody Zacharias was born August 15, 1996 also known as “xen” I am an ethical hacker, developer, and entrepreneur from Tampa, Florida. He’s self-taught and have found security flaws in prestigious corporations such as AT&T, Adobe, Vice News, LastPass, Xfinity, and RedHat. He’s also known for developing commonly used hacking and intelligence software. He has quited hacking (for now) and he’s now applying his hacker skills and thinking to other facets of life and businesses such as social media.
You may have used the word hacker. It sounds suspicious, and for good cause, but you’ve probably been told that there are good hackers.
Strong hackers are also known as white hats or defense hackers, and bad hackers are called crackers or black hats. Strong and poor hackers work in almost the same way, and they also use the same skills to execute hacking, so what allows one better than the other?
While most of the vulnerabilities we read in the news come from the people who have sinister motives, there are a lot more extremely smart and committed people who use their hacking skills for the common good. It is necessary to consider the distinction.
Hacking Good
White hat hackers, or ethical hackers, operate from inside a business. The company recruits the hacker to help strengthen the protection of their device by penetrating it much as a bad hacker would.
The organization has complete knowledge of the existence of the hackers and grants them full license to use their capacity to exploit vulnerabilities. The hacker reports these problems to the organization and might also be able to resolve them, or at least include a report on whether there are bugs that need to be resolved.
Hacking is a positive thing in this situation because the hacker did not access the device without authorization. He or she took nothing, did not deface the company’s website, did not leak confidential details to staff, etc. All of this was done lawfully and with the absolute approval of the corporation and an explicit intent in mind.
Ethical Hacking Like a Career
While white hat hackers are not generally known as well as they should be, more and more businesses are searching for people who can keep ahead of individuals determined to bring down their networks.
By recruiting white hat hackers, corporations have a chance to fight. While these programming gurus were once deemed outcasts in the public eye, many hackers still hold crucial and highly high-paying positions with companies, governments, and other organizations. In fact, in some situations, the hacker could even go to jail for bad hacking and be recruited later to do it legally!
Of course, not all data breaches can be avoided, so if businesses recruit employees who are able to detect them before they become crucial, half the battle has been won.
Ethical Hackers Examples
Tim Berners-Lee: best known for inventing the World Wide Web, Javascript, and URL structures.
Vinton Cerf: Regarded as the “father of the Internet,” Cerf has been really influential in developing the Internet that we use today.
Dan Kaminsky: Well-regarded technology analyst best known for his part in uncovering the Sony BMG copy protection rootkits fiasco.
Ken Thompson: has co-created the Unix operating system and the C programming language.
Donald Knuth: one of the most influential people in the world of computer programming and scientific computation.
Larry Wall: Developer of PERL, a high-level programming language that can be used for a wide range of activities.
Connect with Cody Zacharias on this website https://codyzacharias.com/ and Instagram: @xen