Hacking is the act of exploring and manipulating the works of another computer or other technological device or system, either for the purpose of understanding how it works or to gain unauthorized access. Hacking is the unauthorized use of computer and network resources and a fraudulent act that is illegal in some ways and helpful in others. The term “hacker” originally meant a very gifted programmer. However, in the recent years the term hacker turned out into something bad and now has a negative implication. It’s troublesome to know that when other people hear the work hacker or hacking it seems that the first thing that pops up out of their minds is that it’s “illegal”.
Now the real question comes out, is hacking ethical or unethical? Or rather is it legal or illegal? It seems that there is a factor of morality when it comes to hacking and I believe that the morality of hacking depends on the person, in this case, the hacker. There is what other techie people call “Ethical Hacking”. Ethical hacking is the act of hacking when it is done by request and under contact between an ethical hacker and an organization initiating the hack. The difference is that the ethical hacker has authorization to whatever he hacks that is in the interest of the organization. Ethical hackers also hack security systems of a certain organization to show its downfall and weaknesses in order to improve it.
When I and my group had our interview in the IT department of our adopted organization we took the opportunity to ask our interviewee if hacking is ethical and unethical. His answer was the same. Hacking can be ethical or unethical it all depends on the objective of the hack. He shared to us one of his experiences in hacking. It was when their organization received a bogus anonymous bomb threat via email which messed up their business because their customers became uneasy because of it. It took two days before their management heeded the help of their IT department and told him to track down who sent the bogus threat. When he was about to track the sender he found out that the IP address and the email address of the sender was masked (hidden) so there was no way of tracking the sender without cracking it. So he cracked the mask one by one then he eventually found out that the sender was only from a nearby area near their establishment. He told us that what he did was one example of ethical hacking because he did it for the good interest of their organization.
However, if there is ethical hacking there would also be unethical hacking. Unethical hacking is exactly what other people usually think about hacking. Hacking becomes unethical when a hacker intrudes or penetrates a system,
