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A white hat (or a white-hat hacker, a whitehat) is an ethical security hacker. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Ethical hacking is a term meant to imply a broader category than just penetration testing. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Under the owner's consent, white-hat hackers aim to identify any vulnerabilities or security issues the current system has. [ 5 ]
A grey hat hacker lies between a black hat and a white hat hacker, hacking for ideological reasons. [20] A grey hat hacker may surf the Internet and hack into a computer system for the sole purpose of notifying the administrator that their system has a security defect, for example. They may then offer to correct the defect for a fee. [19]
White hat, in de Bono's Six Thinking Hats; Black and white hat symbolism in film; White hat (computer security), a computer hacker intending to improve security; White hat bias, cherry picking the evidence and publication bias
The grey hat generally has the skills and intent of the white hat but may break into any system or network without permission. [3] [4] According to one definition of a grey-hat hacker, when they discover a vulnerability, instead of telling the vendor how the exploit works, they may offer to repair it for a small fee.
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
This page was last edited on 26 December 2010, at 04:36 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
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The hacker ethic originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s–1960s. The term "hacker" has long been used there to describe college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, and was used more generally to describe a project undertaken or a product built to fulfill some constructive goal, but also out of pleasure for mere involvement.