Gray hat

All you want to know about Gray hat

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A grey hat, in the hacking community, refers to a skilled hacker who sometimes acts legally, sometimes in good will, and sometimes not. They are a hybrid between white and black hat hackers. They usually do not hack for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may or may not occasionally commit crimes during the course of their technological exploits.

Contents

Disambiguation

One reason a grey hat might consider himself to be grey is to disambiguate from the other two extremes: black and white. It is possibly misleading to say that grey hat hackers do not hack for personal gain. While they do not necessarily hack for malicious purposes, grey hats do hack for a reason, a reason which more often than not remains undisclosed. A grey hat will not necessarily notify the system admin of a penetrated system of their penetration. A grey hat will prefer anonymity at almost all cost, carrying out their penetration undetected and then leaving undetected. Consequently, grey hat penetrations of systems tend to be far more passive activities such as testing, monitoring, or less destructive forms of data transfer and retrieval.

A person who breaks into a computer system and simply puts their name there whilst doing no damage (such as in wargaming) can also be classified as a grey hat. A person who hacks for comedic value, may also be classified as a grey hat. However, he would have found his own security flaw, rather than using someone else's. See Script Kiddie for details.


The apache.org hack. by {} and Hardbeat

In April 2000, grey hat hackers gained unauthorized access to apache.org[1]. These people could have tried to damage apache.org servers, write text offensive to apache crew, or distribute trojans or other malicious actions. Instead, they chose just to alert apache crew of the problems and then to publish this article, beginning with:

     This paper does _not_ uncover any new vulnerabilities. It points out common
     (and slightly less common) configuration errors, which even the people at
     apache.org made. This is a general warning. Learn from it. Fix your systems,
     so we won't have to :)
     This paper describes how, over the course of a week, we succeeded in
     getting root access to the machine running www.apache.org, and changed
     the main page to show a 'Powered by Microsoft BackOffice' logo instead
     of the default 'Powered by Apache' logo (the feather). No other changes
     were made, except to prevent other (possibly malicious) people getting in.

See also

References

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_hat"

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