Definitions

Welcome again !!! I would like you all  to go thru the following definitions and make sure you can differentiate one form the other. It is not enough if you know what is hacking. You got to be familiar with at least the basic terms so that it will be of some help. There are a lot of people who do cracking but say they are hackers as they do not know the difference between a cracker and a hacker.

Hacker:

Hacking is an art. The art of making changes to a software after it has been compiled and a copyright has been obtained. It can also be put this way, it is the un-authorized access to a computer either for fun or for malicious or fraudulent purposes. A person involved in this is called a hacker.

Cracker:

This is not very much different from hacking. It is the art of getting passwords or breaking into systems by by-passing the security. The method of obtaining the passwords may vary. For example, in olden days, the hackers tried the brute forcing method which is a tedious one. Now the hackers, use software to do the job, or use their brain a bit to crack the password in a matter of a few minutes. Hackers can be crackers.

Phreaking:

This is the art of playing with telephones. You can say making others pay for a call you made or tapping others call for fun, etc. All these come under phreaking. This has a lot of electronics involved rather than software. This is a totally different line. If you are good at electronic and communication then this is a topic that would interest you. Do not mix it up with hacking as most of the websites have both in them.

Reverse Engineering:

You can call this hacking in a way, but the actual meaning of this is to modify the codes written by somebody else with/without their permission. The modification is done at assembly level. So you must possess a good knowledge on Assembly language to modify the codes. They disassemble the software using disassembler's, understand the logic and flow control to modify the program to their will. The basic tools they will require are a Hex editor and re-assembler to generate the exe after disassembling.

Spoofing:

Spoofing means pretending to be somebody else on the network. It is commonly referred to as 'anonymity' on the net. In technical terms, it is a process where senders forge their original data to make it appear as if the packet were coming from somewhere else.

Nukes:

These are a breed of guys who love to crash others machines. They are not virus programmers as such. They do a lot of coding similar to that of a virus programmer.

Sniffing:

It is the art of watching traffic on the net and extracting passwords and data at the right time. Tapping the data packets that flow from one terminal to another on the net without the knowledge of both the terminals.

Floods:

Sending more traffic than what a machine can handle. For example, sending a mail server 10 million mails in one go or, sending a few million requests to a server like yahoo so that the server can't take any more and hangs.

Now, I hope you will have a nice time surfing through my site. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.