HACKING.........................

Hacking! Sounds dreadful! Isn’t it? The general perception about hacking is that it is a way of stealing information from computers. However that’s not true. The correct term for the method described above is cracking. Hacking is actually the intrusion into computers to expose their vulnerabilities and the security holes. Hackers are actually pranksters and most of the times are not ill-willed. There was a time when hacking was quite tough, even for the computer geeks.  However with the spread of Internet and thanks to the numerous works our forefathers did in the field of hacking, hacking at present is a little bit application of mind and lots of social engineering.  There are a large number of tools available on Internet which can help in this.

For hacking, a person must clearly understand what his goals are! Why does he want to intrude into otherwise inaccessible computers and what he intends to do once he succeeds in gaining access.  The next thing is to decide how to execute the plans like ‘what needs to be done to remotely connect to other systems without the prior permission from the system administrators’. It is always better to take consent of the person whose computer’s vulnerability are you going to expose. Now-a-days the cyber rules are quite restrict regarding hacking and any mistakes knowingly or unknowingly may have serious consequences.

Some of the important tools available for hacking are:

# KEYSTROKE LOGGERS- It’s a fun to use. Just install on the system and invite your friends to log into their email or Orkut accounts. The Keystroke Logger takes the imprint of the keys pressed and displays it. So anything which is typed will be recorded into its database and since passwords are also entered through the keyboard it records them too. These passwords can be retrieved through the database in a matter of seconds.

#MAC Spoofing- In common words MAC spoofing is the technique of changing the MAC address of one computer by replacing it with any other computer’s MAC address. This is generally done to to get unrestricted access to Internet.  For this, the new MAC must be of those computers  who have access to the internet. 

MAC is the acronym for Media Access Control.  It is the physical address of the networking cards installed inside the computer. MAC spoofing is generally done when the network administrator restricts the use of INTERNET only for a few computers on a large network.

#ROUTER HACK-   Routers are the devices that connect to different kinds of networks like wired and wireless networks. It can be hacked too. Depending on the security arrangements they employ like MAC Filter, WEP, WPA different tools such as Aircrack, KISMET are available to bypass these security arrangements and extract the data necessary for hacking.

# PORT SCANNING- If we imagine computer as a home, ports will its windows. Every port in a computer is utilized by some services. Port Scanning is a technique of finding open ports in a system.  Through these open ports one can get unrestricted access to other computer’s data. Besides these there are also some other tools which can assist you in hacking. A lot of information is available on Internet and one can take their help.

Also, It is easier to learn hacking on LINUX platforms than the WINDOWS platforms because most of the good tools for hacking are easily available on the Linux based operating systems compared to WINDOWS operating system.  The best operating system available for hacking is BACKTRACK. It can be downloaded from INTERNET and is free of cost. It contains almost all the tools available for hacking. 

Before someone attempts hacking, it is strongly advised to take into consideration its legal implications. Use hacking with prior consent of the system administrators to find out the loop holes in the cyber security measures. The best hackers in the world are also the best cyber security experts in this rapidly growing IT age.