Thursday, August 21, 2008

Grey Hat

| Ethics | Hactivisme | White | Black | Grey | Blue | Methods | Script Kiddie | Computer |
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.

Disambiguation

One reason a grey hat might consider himself to be grey is to disambiguate from the other two extremes: black and white. It might be a little 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 - see) 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.

| Ethics | Hactivisme | White | Black | Grey | Blue | Methods | Script Kiddie | Computer |

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