50 years ago, famous comic book writer, Stan Lee, created the famous quote, “With great power, there must also come great responsibility” (Lieber). This phrase speaks of the control one must exercise when in possession of power, which so many historical figures like Hitler and Napoleon failed to do. However, no longer is a person required to hold a high-level of leadership to be able to possess an unbelievable amount of power over others. The rising notoriety of computer hackers is forcing society to decide of how to handle them. Currently, computer historians define today’s modern period as the Information Age defined as “an age in human history characterized by the shift from the Industrial Revolution to an economy based on information computerization.” (Rouse). With this being the case, hackers have become an issue to the security of businesses, governments, and banks. However, there are those who have taken the responsibility to stand against this digital threat and who specializes in the testing of an organization's information systems through means of ethical hacking to increase online security. While society may view hacking as a criminal act, our culture would benefit more from teaching programmers to hack ethically in a safe and controlled environment as a counter to actual hackers.

Laws and regulations that define are outlined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It defines that “any intentionally accesses to a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer” (CFAA). So, any form of entering anyone’s device without permission is considered illegal which is a hacker’s ultimate goal. The first appearance of hackers was in the 1960s which was formed from a group of MIT students, which without the internet, could not cause any real damage to anyone. Most of the hacking that took place was through social engineering which it defined by Google as “(in the context of information security) the use of deception to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information that may be used for fraudulent purposes”. After the invention of the internet, hackers became increasingly dangerous with access to any computer connected to the web.  

Malicious hackers whose goal is to destroy, modify, or steal data are referred to as black hat hackers. This is shown in a recently reported news article: a group of black hats hacked Russia’s Central Bank and stole around $34 million US dollars’ worth of Russian currency. The actions of black hats are devastating and cruel to those who they affect and are a constant threat to the economy of targeted countries. So, if black hats can carry out these kinds of disasters, then why should hacking be encouraged?

The author of the article only focused on these hacker’s criminal nature rather than acknowledging their profound skilled to hack into a government bank without a trace. The individuals who use their skill in hacking to combat these criminals are known as white hat hackers. The primary goal of white hat hackers is to make systems and applications more secure to keep the black hats out. Recently, the Pentagon compensated white hats for every bug that they could uncover on their website which allowed the Defense Department to plug 138 vulnerabilities in their systems (Dickstein).
Commodity Computers)

Ethical hacking is the best defense against black hats because to ultimately guard against a hacker, one must think like a hacker. Our society should also encourage training hackers because “Simply telling an aspiring hacker ‘don’t hack, end of story’ works about as well as the other abstinence-only approach. Curiosity works, but information protects.” (Gervais). Creating a safe environment for people to learn to hack along with educating them with facts and teaching responsibility can introduce them to the white hat industry. Society would then have a better chance of acquiring better trained hackers then the black hat community and over-all cyber security would increase.

Note: a lot of this I took from my MWA1. I’ll be revising this paper so not to copyright myself. I honestly didn’t fully understand MWA1 when I wrote it and I treated it more like this assignment.
