Hackers and Their Positive and Negative Roles in Society

In my essay I am going to speak about hackers and their negative and positive roles in the society. Hacking is a relatively old issue, dated to 1961. There are many ways to define hackers but in my opinion their position as reckless criminals who endanger companies and individuals, outpaces their positive effects.

Nowadays there is a lot of evidence on the harm and the loss that they cause to big companies and as well to individuals. USA and UK are countries that have had the most hacking activity, which rapidly increases over time.

However hackers are like a double-edged sword. Besides their disadvantages there are the positive impacts they have on the technological world. Hackers are considered as technological innovators. This is based on the fact that the main aim of the early hackers was to develop and perfectionate systems and software, but this issue has changed a lot since then. But we cannot call them technological innovators since there is a huge contrast between the negative impacts and the innovation that hackers bring.

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"The word "hacker" itself means a person who enjoys exploring the details of computers by knowing how to stretch their capabilities, a malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around". Hackers are often seen as "White hats" or "Black hats." White hat hackers help fix badly written software programs and write new programs for the greater good of the computing community. Black hats modify or create software for criminal purposes such as stealing your passwords, your identity, and your bank account or simply to slow the Internet down to no one's amusement but themselves.

These are the people that made companies such as "Emulex" in US lose 2.5 billion $ in 15 minutes and Lucent Technologies in March 2001 receive a 4% decline.

Economic profits represent the main target for hackers. The damage and the loss that hackers cause to companies or individuals go as a profit in their pockets. This factor is becoming more and more popular, tempting different categories of people to become hackers.

Another reason of hacking is the political activism. The Telia web site in Sweden was defaced in 1996 as a result of growing discontent with the monopoly and pricing for Internet Services. Also an internationally well-known group PHAIT (Portuguese Hackers Against Indonesian Tyranny) attacked Indonesian authorities many times in 1997, motivated by the situation in East Timor.

Beside these another reason for hacking is revenge. Police officers investigating computer crime received credit cards and phone bills in huge amounts. This is a clear evidence of revenge towards them from hackers. These cases show that hacker's intentions are malicious and there is no point of technological innovation.

Hackers most of the time think that what they do is something that doesn't hurt anyone and this happens because they really don't see anyone hurt around them. Many people think that hacking doesn't mean violating ethics. Let's consider the fact of breaking into a car and stealing it. Everyone will consider this case as breaking of the ethical issues and the person who did that will be called a thief, and will suffer other consequences. On the other hand a hacker does almost the same thing without being condemned. He breaks into someone's system and steals his information or his password and his money. In this case he is hardly going to be called a thief and this action won't be seen as breaking the ethical issues.

This is the way hackers consider the ethical issues, but this has also its positive side. Hackers are promoting technological development in many computer industries. Microsoft for example has invited a group of hackers to break into their systems. This is a way of testing which enables Microsoft to build more secure systems.

Hackers at early 60s were denoted as wise computer developers who helped a lot in the innovation of the computer science. Groups of students in different universities working on systems and software brought a lot of technological improvement. They gave birth to many international software companies.

Later on the term hacker got another meaning, that of the bad guys who have malicious intentions and who cause a lot of harm to the society. The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit has revealed that computer criminals are costing 2.4 billion pounds a year to the Britain business. There is an increase with 90% of the companies that are being attacked at least once by these criminals during this year, compared with 83% during the last year.

Beside that almost every person is suffering the damages caused by hackers. Many lethal computer viruses attacking everyday can lead to the complete loss of information. There is also some malicious software called keystrokes that steal passwords by taking screenshots or by copying every typed character. As we can see the damage that computer criminals cause is present everywhere.

Different surveys are held to see how hacking is increasing every day. If we have a look in their results we see they are frightening. Forty-three percent (43%) of security and law enforcement executives responding report that the total number of electronic crimes and network, systems or data intrusions experienced by their organizations increased in 2003 in comparison with the 2002. Twenty- three percent (23%) report no change in the number of e-crimes and intrusions while only six percent (6%) report a decrease. Twenty-eight percent (28%) of respondents don't know whether the total number of electronic crimes and intrusions differed in 2003 compared to 2002.

This means that hacking is becoming a big problem to everybody. The negative consequences, which computer criminals cause, differ from company to company and from person to person. If we try to make a comparison by putting in balance the innovation and the damage that hackers bring, we can see they are like two sides of a coin. The graph of the losses goes very high compared with that of innovation, so there is no evidence of calling hackers computer innovators.

Considering all the cases in witch computer hacker are involved we can clearly see what they really are. People every day do efforts to escape from the 'lethal' hands of hackers. Revising all the above stated I can say that hackers are reckless criminals who endanger companies and individuals.