What can hackers do?

You may find this hard to believe but hackers can do almost anything on the internet. But what do they really want to do?

Well you may have seen my other article about the different types of hackers and that will contribute to this article. I'm going to be talking about Black Hats and Grey Hats in this article.


Hackers (Black Hats) are usually looking to either deface, take over, or destroy things on the internet. Hackers can literally BECOME you on the internet. They could find a target on the internet
lets say our target is a guy called Jason McFly (just a little reference to Back to The Future). Okay so the first thing we would do is find this guy's age and birthday. So that can be really easy to do especially if he has a Facebook or MySpace. Most people HAD a MySpace, or they have one that is still floating around the internet. Well what we do is we look him up on the MySpace AND Facebook. If we find both and on both he's age 18 and on both his birthday is 02/03/91 then we can assure ourselfs that this guy is 18 and his birthday is February 3, 1991.

Next we have to find his email address. This could take a while of searching but since this guy is 18 and by looking at his Facebook and MySpace you can tell he's in college and he's a drinker, also you can tell that he's a frat boy. So this is the best victim for you (because he fits the steriotype of an idiot, I'm not saying all frat boys are idiots but he fits the steriotype nonetheless). So we find out his email address by doing a lot of searching, hackers are very persistant by the way, and we find that his email address is fratboi2391@hotmail.com. So we can tell that he uses his birthday for as an extention to things. This could help us find his password. Well one thing that we would have wanted to find first was his location. A hacker would have first looked for a victim in his/her location.

So now we have to find our guy and use a technique called Social Engineering to get information from him without him really understanding what we're trying to do. We could pose as another frat boy, or act like a professor if we're old enough either way we have to make this person give us
information. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole thing and it doesn't necissarily have to be done in order to steal this persons password and identity. We could simply find a website that he's connected to and using SQL injections find his password that way, or of course we could just steal their password logs. But we have to get at least ONE password.

Once we have a password we can access anything. Especially if this guy has very low internet security. What I mean is that most people use the same password for a number of things. So lets say his password is carsrgreat2391 then we can bet that his password for Facebook and/or myspace is probably carsrgreat2391.

For the sake of this example I'll say that this guy set EVERY password that he has as carsrgreat2391. So now we have access to his Facebook wall, and MySpace page. We can tell from the last login that our guy hardly every uses his MySpace so lets deface his page shall we? Or should we keep a low profile until we have his information? Lets do the second one.

Okay so after a bit of searching and hours of drinking energy drinks we find out that this guy uses NetSpend and PayPal to manage his money. He transfers his paycheck to his NetSpend so he can use his Debit Card to access his money. Well that was his mistake. Now we can transfer his money to our PayPal accound and buy a bunch of stuff. Of course we would use a proxy to access NetSpend and to create our PayPal account so they can't trace our IP Address.

Now that we have all of his money and access to everything, heres what we would do

1. Change the password on his email
2. Change the password on his PayPal account
3. Change the password on his NetSpend account
4. Change the password on his Facebook
5. Change the password on his MySpace
6. Have fun

Now of course I made that look easier than it actually is. Of course this would probably take a week if not a month to accomplish, not to mention that if you have a job or school this could take even longer to accomplish. So we're probably looking at a month of stalking a person down and stealing his password.

Of course that's just one thing that a hacker would do. Hackers also do many many other things. There are crackers out there as well that break into software and applications. There are phreakers who hack phones. There are just so many things that hackers hack.

Every hacker has a different goal. The really persistant hackers are the ones that do the example I presented you with. But most hackers now are Grey Hats and all they really just want to deface websites to gain "respect".

There's a sensation going on with hackers where Grey Hats feel like they have to hack websites to gain a certain respect much like how graffiti artists tag areas to get their name known. They go on hacker forums and post their many sites that they hacked to show people how "L33T" they
are.

How can YOU prevent getting hacked?

1. Use different passwords
2. Use UNIQUE passwords
3. Don't be an idiot
4. Make sure you have good anti-virus software

So now that you know what and how hackers do what they do you can protect yourself from being hacked. Thanks for reading,