Last modified: 2023-03-29
White Hat Hacker's book
These are my notes, that help me to organize the accumulated knowledge and to congregate it in one place. Intended to be offline source.
What is a hacker?
For me, a hacker is skilled computer expert that uses their technical knowledge to overcome a problem by creative means.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy - often in collective effort - the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to achieve novel and clever outcomes
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.
Hackers have a mind that is optimized for figuring out what is possible. When presented with some random new gadget, your mom will ask what it can do, hacker will ask what can I make this do.
The term is, unfortunately, more often being associated with a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.
A hacker is a person who breaks into a computer system.
Without hackers, we would not have computers. Look at Steve Wozniak for example.
Here is a great example what skilled person / hacker can do: Using My Python Skills To Punish Credit Card Scammers.
Personally, I do not approve of black-hat-hacking, however I do encourage white-hat-hacking. White-hat-hackers are very important for security and freedom of all of us.
I am happy that times change and hackers are gaining a better reputation. I am also happy that the obsolete trend of threatening hackers for finding a flaws in systems is dying out. Not long ago it was common practice for companies to threat with legal actions or even have police raid homes if anyone tried to let them know of discovered problem.
Imagine a physical bank building. And imagine that on your way to said bank you notice somebody forgot to close a door into the vault. White-hat-hacker would go to the front desk and report such problem, a noble thing to do. Unfortunately for a long time the bank would threaten to call police instead of thanking you and fixing the issue. How would you like that?
Thankfully this mentality is dying out and hackers and security researchers are in some cases even being rewarded for reporting a security flaws.
Background
This document has been evolving for a long time now. On my way to become a white-hat-hacker I have learned a lot, and I am still learning.
Back in 2020, I started writing these notes in LaTeX, but eventually hit a wall with long compile times and huge PDF document (over 400 pages). Not to mention portability and accessibility problems.
Links
- Main repository, issue tracker and so on at git.sr.ht/~atomicfs
- Mirror repository at gitlab.com
Hosted static web-pages
white-hat-book.white-hat-hacker.icu
