Hacker- A person that illegally gains access and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system. This is the definition of a hacker as given in a Merriam-Webster dictionary. This is also probably what the majority of people think of when they hear the word. With all of the technology in today’s world and with technology still increasing in use and intelligence hackers are becoming more and more of a threat. Hackers just don’t stick to computers now days they can hack into cell phones, video game systems, and basically anything that people use to share information. I actually have had a recent encounter with hacking. I had ordered something online and I had thought everything had gone through smoothly. About a week later I get a call from my bank saying that somebody in Georgia had used my card number and racked up over 5,000 dollars worth of charges on it. I know that the site was legitimate because I had used it before and nothing of this sort had happened. The hardest part of determining who a hacker could be is the fact that it could literally be anybody. My senior year of high school I took a computer elective class and in that class was a foreign exchange student from the Ukraine. At first I thought he was just a normal kid until he showed me what he could do with a computer. He in a matter of minutes got into our schools computer system and proceeded to “hack” into all of his teacher’s grade books. After changing his grades he began to play with the grades of others raising them or lowering them based of whether he liked the person or not. I was so amazed that he simply took down our schools computer system with the same amount of effort that it takes to log into facebook. After he had finish altering grades he showed me his grand finale. He shut down every computer in the entire school. The one catch to this seemingly perfect prank was the fact that his computer was the only one to not shut down making it easy for the teacher and our I.T supervisor to locate the computer that caused the chaos. Although they completely redid the computer security system Dmitri still got into the system again and again, although never causing the chaos he did the first time. Hacking is avoidable but inevitable. The more and more that people rely on technology the more risks they take of getting hacked. They sell programs and systems to stop people from hacking into your technological devices it’s only a matter of time before some guy in his mom’s basement finds a way around your protection. I know not every hacker out there is a man and I’m sure the majority don’t leave with their mothers but its how I like to picture them because of my unfavorable view of what they do. With all the hacking going on in the world today I feel that it is only a matter of time until someone becomes smart enough to hack into a government system and begins to cause chaos. Then the threat of hacking goes from bad to catastrophic.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker
