When you think of a hacker, the image of a hooded person in a dark room lit up by a screen of complex codes might flash across your mind. You might think of illegal digital activity, theft, and cyber attacking. But things aren’t always as they seem and not all hackers deserve that impression – there’s bad hacking, but there’s also good hacking.
Today, let's look at white hacker meaning and how some of these white hat hackers are making the decentralized finance (DeFi) space more secure.
What Is A Hacker?
Traditionally, a hacker – also referred to as a security hacker – is an individual who seeks to exploit the vulnerabilities of a computer system or network. The prevalent meaning today however, relates to criminal activities performed by security hackers.
As such, we may define hackers as individuals who use their technical knowledge to bypass cybersecurity obstacles, gaining unauthorized access to digital information and computing environments. In some cases, hackers use their skills to disrupt or break a specific program.
Though typically, security hackers are classified as either white hat, black hat, or gray hat, according to their mETHodology and motives.
White Hacker Meaning (White Hat Hackers)
Also known as ETHical hackers, white hat hackers strive to improve security as they seek to expose all possible gaps in a project’s underlying code by finding vulnerabilities so that they can be patched. They may arrive at their discovery through research on open-source software (free for all), self-owned systems and software, or through investigative rights given to them by developer-run ‘bug bounty programs’.
Working with the permission of their target, some white hats are also hired as full-time employees while others solely go after bounty programs and hacking competitions, which reward them for each security flaw they find or for each system they manage to break. Additionally, most white hat hackers hold a college degree in information security or computer science, and many of them are certified in ETHical hacking.
What Tools Do White Hat Hackers Use?
The tools used by white hat hackers are the same as those used by black hats (cybercriminals), but the intent of use is to help organizations upgrade the security of their networks.
They conduct a stress test with deep scans of networks for malware, identifying potential threat of hacking in a platform’s information systems, and even fooling the organization/platform’s employees into clicking on links that lead to malware infestations. In addition, these are two common ways in which they help improve systems:
Pen Tests: Short for penetration tests, ETHical hackers use their knowledge to identify potential entry points into systems and then breach them to determine the extent of damage they can cause.
Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack: This is one of the most popular forms of attack in the world of crypto. These attacks render the service unavailable to the users through network disruptions and outages caused by performance impacting hacks. Organizations need to have a DoS response plan, which can be made robust with the help of white hat hackers.
How White Hat Hackers Can Help
In early 2022, crypto exchange Coinbase was saved from an embarrassing disaster when white-hat hacker ‘Tree of Alpha’ connected with CEO Brian Armstrong to apprise him of an impending threat. It was pointed out that the Coinbase order books could be transferred to other addresses at arbitrary rates, allowing criminals to make millions of dollars in the process.
This was a critical expose, and within two hours of being briefed, the exchange patched the vulnerability and restored trading services for all users – a befitting example of how white hat hackers can really help.
Closing Thoughts
With cybercrimes increasing as cryptocurrencies become more popular, the need to identify underlying issues and secure systems has risen. Having learnt white hacker meaning, we now know how important white hat hackers are for maintaining security.
By hacking into systems, they discover weaknesses before malicious hackers do, and then operate with the company to fix them to prevent the weaknesses from evolving into bigger issues for users. We can truly say that they act as the faceless guardians of major crypto networks, silently protecting users from behind the curtains.
