Hacker is a term used to mean a variety of things over the years, and as a catch all name for ‘bad guys’ perpetrating cybercrimes it’s pretty well accepted. Most people are unaware that different meanings exist when we say hacker, and it would be reasonable to ask why should you care? However, in understanding the motivation and objective behind your ‘hacker’ – you may be in a better position to plan an appropriate defence. Websense offers a guicde…
Malicious hackers can be broken down in to 5 broad classifications:
1. Script kiddies
These barely shaving malodorous teens want in on the action, hacking late in to the night, drinking pop and eating giant bags of crisps. Remember the film “War Games”? Despite the fact that it’s nearly 30 years later the resemblance is just as popular as ever. Often they break into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work, other times they are flexing their newly formed cyber muscles.
2. Hacktivists
When hackers are motivated by social, political, religious, environmental, or other personal beliefs, they fall under this category. Normally thought of as natural-fibre wearing picketers with hand written cardboard signs or hanging out of trees in protest, these activists have swapped the spray paint for the keyboard and frequently use a variety of software tools readily available on the Internet to get their message across to the larger audience.
3. eMugger
This is the largest group of cybercriminal. In another era they would have been found nicking your purse, knocking over old ladies or selling solid gold watches for £10 from a battered old suitcase. These guys have picked up a few skills along the way, nothing too complicated, just straightforward malware, adware, or spam. Once they have perfected how to do it once, they do it again and again and again.
4. Heavyweight Ninja
These are the heavyweights of the cybercriminal world. Corporate attack and espionage is a stealthy, organised, funded activity by professional agents operating rather like the legitimate companies they hope to steal from. The worker bees are usually found beavering away with state of the art computing equipment, multiple monitors and the blinds well drawn. While the big cheeses are well connected individuals with fingers in pies and eyes firmly on the ball. Together they make a formidable team.
5. Cyber Soldiers
This is nation-state activity to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage, disruption or exploitation with an endgame objective of disabling an opponent’s military capability. These guys are the special forces of the threat landscape; super skilled buzz-cut clean shaven expert hackers. You’d never know who they were however – because if I told you I’d have to kill you.
Read the full report here.
