Hacker: You keep using that word...

So. Tell me about hackers. If you're like most people, you think of them as enemies who have malicious intent to get into a computer system (possibly yours, probably that of someone richer and more powerful than you). Maybe you think they're greasy-haired, goth louts who are spending too much time in front of a computer screen (such poetry!). These hackers want to exploit your system for personal gain, and you will be the victim.

Basically this guy

Then there are people who say that "hacking" is getting into someone's Facebook account (because they forgot to log out) and posting a status that says "I am so gay lol lol lol lol ;) " If you think this is hacking, you're probably twelve. I'm sorry; I thought you knew. 

This is you. Sorry.

It's not exactly surprising that most people think of hacking as something dangerous and hackers as something to be feared; there is no shortage of evidence that malicious infiltration fo a system can cause extensive damage. There's James Jefferey ("Pablo Escobar"), who stole patient data from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. Then we have the Melissa virus, created by David L. Smith ("Kwyjibo"), which crashed email systems in the late 90s. The 414s illegally accessed information from high-security banks and laboratories. And let's not forget LulzSec's 2011 attack on Sony, which compromised confidential user information. The list goes on and on.

These are clearly Bad Things. What would your mother say if she knew you were breaking into other people's property and stealing their stuff? It wouldn't be good. So why can't we just say that hackers are bad and be done with it?

Because that's not the end of the story.

The hackers described are what's generally known as "black hat" hackers, or hackers that "violat[e] computer or Internet security maliciously or for illegal personal gain" [source]. Where there are black hats, though, there must be white hats. White hat hackers are security experts hired to find flaws in the security systems in place around websites or computer networks. The word "hired" here is important: you know this hacker will be getting into your stuff and you've explicitly given them permission to do so. Otherwise it's technically still illegal. White-hat hacking has been such a valuable tool to security systems that you can now become a Certified Ethical Hacker and make hacking your profession. 

See how professional Philippe looks?

White-hat hackers have been in the news a fair amount recently. A few months ago, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek exposed to Toyota and Ford ways that their cars could be hijacked with a laptop: 

... they devised ways to force a Toyota Prius to brake suddenly at 80 miles an hour, jerk its steering wheel, or accelerate the engine. They also ... can disable the brakes of a Ford Escape traveling at very slow speeds, so that the car keeps moving no matter how hard the driver presses the pedal.

The team actually released the code [article, not the code itself, sorry] for this project at this year's DefCon, an annual hacking conference held in Las Vegas. 

More recently, a different team has helped expose vulnerabilities on Wall Street that could allow someone to force a market to crash. 

So now we have good hackers and bad hackers. Dichotomy makes things easy, right? Except there's a whole spectrum between. Grey hat hackers, as you might expect, fall somewhere in between black and white hats. A good example of a grey hat hacker is someone who casually tries to break into websites (without permission), but then contacts the owners saying, "Hey, you have a security vulnerability here and here. If you want, I could fix it for you..." and probably adding in, "...for a price." This is weird on an ethical scale. On the one hand, they still broke in illegally and are basically ransoming knowledge; on the other, they chose not to exploit your website and are offering to help. 

I'd also like to propose that there are shades of grey; not all grey hats are the same color (make a Fifty Shades reference here and I swear I'll block you from this blog). That guy up there? Probably a fairly light shade of gray. A little lighter if he fixes things for free, a little darker if he charges a fee (unintentional rhymes happen). 

Then you have groups like Anonymous.

You've seen them before.

Anonymous, a group of internet ne'er-do-wells with very loose organization and no real leadership, span the entire range of the grey spectrum. They don't do things legally. Ever. (At least not online. Peaceful protests in person are perfectly safe. Unintentional alliteration happens, too). And a lot of what they do -- like bringing down or defacing websites -- falls solidly in the Bad Things category of pastimes. Still, though, I can't bring myself to label them as black hats. Throughout everything they've done, and they've done a lot, they seem to have their weird, twisted, lulz-soaked hearts in the right place. They've helped expose Chinese hackers who worked against the US. They brought down child pornography websites and made user information publicly available. Anonymous is a group of weird people who do bad things for (generally) good reasons. 

So where does that leave us? Is a hacker someone who crashes your website and steals your information? A professional you hire to protect yourself? An internet junkie with ambition and too much time on their hands? 

Yes.

A hacker is all of these things. The word can mean just about anything, and that makes it completely useless. We wouldn't need terms like "black hat," "white hat," and "hactivist," (which is a stupid word. Please please please don't actually say that) if the term "hacker" had any meaning on its own. So next time someone starts getting all smart and starts talking about "hackers" as if they were all the same entity, go ahead and tell them