Hacked...For You!

Hackers..I find these people really really cool. Man they can do all sorts of stuff which otherwise are not permitted. Well, the definition for hacking says. "Hacking is the practice of modifying the features of a system, in order to accomplish a goal outside of the creator's original purpose." The person who is constantly engaging in hacking activities is called a 'Hacker'. It wouldn't come as a surprise to you that there are indeed 2 types of hackers.

• White hat hackers (good ones)
• Black hat hackers (bad ones, also known crackers)

While white hat hacking is a hobby for some, others provide their services for a fee. Thus, a white hat hacker may work as a consultant or be a permanent employee on a company's payroll. A good many white hat hackers are former black hat hackers.

You must have heard of this hack when the new iOS 7 was released with the finger-printing technology. A small group of people actually hacked this feature in a couple of days, all this while being in a hotel room (Being hotel room is strange but the fact is that they were indeed there in a room in Miami )

FBI is always on the look-out for such cyber-criminals and the current list for the most-wanted can be seen here.

To combat attacks from such hackers, there are multiple organizations that organize mock-up days, competitions to expose zero-day vulnerabilities. One such incident happened recently when the White hat hackers exposed flaws of the US Stock market.

To market their product really well, companies also organize such zero-day competitions and offer huge cash prize to people who expose vulnerabilities in their product.One done by Google can be found here, another competition which is the most well-renowned (like Angel Hackathon) is Pwn2Own, offering prizes from $10,000 - $100,000.

I personally feel is that security experts are really the game changers in any product. No matter how awesome your product is, if it can be easily bypassed then it can severely affect the product.

Stay tuned for some more technical stuff!