The hacker's ethics

The ethics of the hacker was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ), they are moral and philosophical values ​​that hackers must have to adhere to a standard.

This is what differentiates hackers who seek to defend themselves from pirates who seek to harm others . The nuance is important .

Journalist Steven Levy is the first to use the term ethical hacker in his book called Hackers . He also defined the following rules:

The ethics of hacking (ethical hacking)

• Access to anything that could teach you something about how the world works should be unlimited and total.

• The information should be free.

• Do not trust authority, prefer decentralization.

• Hackers should be judged on their exploits and not on criteria such as age, origin, sex, diploma etc ...

• You can create art and beauty with a computer.

• Computers can improve your life.

He also asks the company to open up its worldview on hackers and expand it to the planet and not just to the little computer genius. He is followed later by hacker  Loyd Blankenship who defines the hacker's manifesto .

More generally, the term "ethical hacker" is used to refer to a real hacker who secures computer systems, not a hacker .

Why put yourself in the shoes of an attacker?

Hacking helps solve problems in many areas. In programming for example, we do not reinvent the wheel, we access the details of a system to build something useful and effective.

Hacking IT security makes it possible to secure one's own systems and online identity by first understanding how attacks work.

From there, the ethical hacker also known as the hacker in the white hat is thus put in the skin of a pirate to understand how he acts, and protect himself.

We try to "learn the attack to better defend ourselves", and we also use the term "offensive security".

The approach, inspired by fire safety training, is standard in the hacking industry:

We present a technique inspired by a real case, we explain it and put it into practice in order to understand the operating principles, and finally we protect ourselves against it.

Present , understand , protect .

The approach is the same for the police: we learn the techniques of thieves to catch them more easily.

Note: Putting the attacks into practice to understand them in a public way presents a potential danger related to the malicious people who would use the information to their advantage. As a result, The Hacker Blog will not provide public details that could lead to illegal actions.

Besides, I have a revelation for you right now:

It is often thought that a hacker is a person very computer savvy, gifted and nomadic.

In fact, once you know their little secrets, you realize that all this does not require extremely in-depth knowledge, and that you can defend yourself by applying simple and methodical concepts.

This hacker's ethics and these secrets are seen in detail in the guide  How to Become an Ethical Hacker that I invite you to follow right now to become a true hacker and fight computer attacks.