Hacking and Cracking

by 22:47 0 comments Cracking HACKING Hacking and Cracking

By: Amal George , BCA 2nd Year, 1st shift

“Hacking and Cracking” are different things BUT people do use these words together because they are both malicious forms of cyber activity or it may be that they end up with a similar sound.

Well if you take a look, Hacking is stealing personal data (Password, Account number, etc.) or private data (company contract, company details, etc.) without the owner’s permission or knowledge, or any act that can breaches your security or privacy zone without your knowledge of what’s going in your system/life.

Whereas, cracking is when the programmer creates or builds a source code for the sole purpose of making the computer think that a particular process has occurred. For example, let’s take keygen (key generator which generates key or licences for some paid software and so on), a key generator and a patch for any application would trick the software into thinking that the key entered is correct, and not let it verify the key with the application server.

In simple words, cracking is when a person looks for the back door or a loophole in a program or an application to get inside the main source code and exploit it for the malicious purpose. Both hacking and cracking are malicious activities used to destroy or copy another person’s identity or information.

Government and companies do hire them for staying ahead of their rivals. Like in the case of government, they hire people who are well trained in hacking and they are well paid, for hacking into different countries’ servers to gather all kind of information mainly based on their economy, their defence and their current status, all of which could threaten or weaken the rivals. In the case of companies, they hire hackers for sneaking into the rival companies’ servers and steal all of their data like the shares, company deals and future ideas. Rival company knowing about these things means they can survive for long.

One of the recent initiatives from the Indian government is making India digital which is one step forward in development of the country. Digital India means making every single thing visible for the citizens like online payment of water bill, electricity bill, housing bill, govt policies and so on. If security is vulnerable, hackers are ready to get into your system and do all sort of malicious activities which can cause high level of distress. To overcome this kind of scenario, the government of India are hiring a good number of I.T professionals for the security purposes, they are also given additional training sessions, workshop lectures to make them stay updated.

 Nowadays certain hacking and cracking tools are also available, some of them are:

·         Nmap (Network Mapper)
Nmap is an abbreviation of 'Network Mapper', and it's a very well-known free open source hackers tool. Nmap is mainly used for network discovery and security auditing.

·         Metasploit Penetration Testing Software
Widely used by cyber security professionals and ethical hackers, this is a tool that you have to learn.

·         THC Hydra
This is a hugely popular password cracker and has a very active and experienced development team.

·         John the Ripper
john the Ripper (often you'll see abbreviated as 'JTR') wins the award for having the coolest name. John the Ripper, mostly just referred to simply as 'John' is a popular password cracking tool.

·         Wireshark
Wireshark essentially captures data packets in a network in real time and then displays the data in the human-readable format (verbose).

“HACKING AND CRACKING CAN BE CATEGORISED AS GOOD OR MALICIOUS. IT DEPENDS ON INTENSIONS OF WHO IS PERFORMING IT.”