What is Hacking ? - Explained

Hacking is often portrayed to be many things it is not. Thanks to the popular portrayal of hackers as young immoral computer experts associated with nearly any possible illegal and immoral activity that can be conducted through a computer, we see hackers are outlaws of cyberspace, out to steal passwords, or get access to your bank account and steal money. They are portrayed as the equivalent to thieves who break into houses or rob banks – or in the mildest case, peeping toms trying to get a look into your private life. This could not be farther from the truth. Sure, the act of remotely accessing someone’s computer to steal their private files would be hacking. Note the words “steal their private files”, what if that condition was removed? Or what if you are simply accessing your own computer or that of a friend’s to help him / her out?

Much like the driver of a car would be called a driver, whether it is done by someone with the car owner’s permission, by the car owner himself  herself or without the car owner’s permission. Driving is driving regardless of the ethics; the context is irrelevant. Similarly a person is a hacker whether they are bypassing their own computer’s security to access their own files, or doing it on someone else’s computer without the permission of the owner.

A person withdrawing money from an ATM using their card is okay; a person withdrawing money from an ATM using someone else’s card without their permission is a thief. A person hacking into a computer to test its security is a hacker who is a security expert, a person hacking into a computer to steal passwords is a criminal. Here the context decides the legality and ethics of the act, and the person is accordingly labelled a “security expert” or “criminal”, but he is a hacker nonetheless.

Hacking is an expression of our own curiosity, “how does it work?”, “why can’t I access it?”, “what happens if I give it 400 volts instead of 220?" It is simply the result of our drive to understand the things around us. Often people are curious about things which may cause them or others harm, such as a child curious about an electricity socket, or an teen curious about  drugs. This is no reason to discourage curiosity, the answer, as always, lies in education not restriction. Many of the greatest minds have simply been unsatisfied by the reality they see around them, and looked for ways to “hack” things to work in ways they want. Without their curiosity, and “hacking” skills, where would we have been?

A computer hacker is one who is curious about the working of computers and software. While many people are happy treating their computer like a black box, where they merely feed in data and get data in return, others strive to break in and understand how it works, and why it works that way. Often, instead of simply accepting things the way they are, they will look for ways to make things work the way they want. While this may be considered juvenile, hacking into someone’s computer, just to see if you can, doesn’t cause anyone any harm as long as you are responsible enough to respect their privacy.

Don’t like the way Windows names shortcuts, hack the registry and change the way it works. Windows may not provide the facility to do this, but that is no reason for us to be limited to the way it works.
In the end, why should there be any kind of artificial limitation to what you can do with your computer? By artificial restriction we mean to say that no amount of hacking is going to make your computer do your laundry! However nothing should stop you from using your computer to its best capacity, as long as it does no one else any harm. Most hackers are not out to steal money from banks, or crack passwords to sell them, they are there for the thrill of the ride. They will try to hack a system just to see if they can, much like picking their neighbours lock, only to lock it back again – perhaps leave a note telling them they should get a better lock.
Hacking constitutes a mind-set, not a skillset. It’s not a “job” it’s not something you do for a living. You may earn because of your skills as a hacker, but the hacker mind-set is what makes a hacker. Like with anything else, you don’t start at the top, you are willing to learn and you poke at things to see where they go; patience is important because it is unlikely you will get what you want in your first try, or your tenth.
To start with, one might simply change the obscure settings accessible to them from Windows, moving further they may install third-party applications which have common hacks for Windows. Then one might go further and change the registry themselves to experiment. The road doesn’t need to end here you can start modifying the actual Windows binaries.
Note we say Windows a lot, what about Linux? Fact is, Linux is much easier to hack than Windows. Shock! Horror! Yes, we said Linux is easier to hack than Windows, but it is also considered more secure. When you look at hacking from the larger-sense perspective of messing with a system out of curiosity, Linux allows you to do more. Linux is intentionally hack-able, allowing each and every parameter to be changed by the user. You can create unique combinations of application sets and features that the distribution creators never envisioned. With Linux you have access to nearly all the source code of the system, how much more hack-friendly could it be! With Windows on the other hand, one would need to use third-party tools, patch binaries change undocumented registry settings, and even then the level of customizability would be much less.
In fact, forget Windows and Linux nor now, hacking need not even involve a computer. While hacking is now predominantly associated with computers, hacking hardware is not uncommon. There are many hardware hacking enthusiasts who using some knowledge of electronics and some of software programming are able to bend their devices to their will.
While you can go all the way up to controlling your toaster over the internet, a simple example of a hardware hack anyone can do is to add a potentiometer to your headphones. A potentiometer is an electrical device which lets you control the voltage across a across it. It is a simple way of varying the voltage of a battery (or other power source) from nearly zero to all the way up to the maximum voltage the battery provides. By adding one to your headphones you can control the power of the signal going to the speakers, thereby giving them rudimentary volume control capability. Don’t do this with expensive head / ear phones though as you will likely end up deteriorating the quality.

In this book we primarily deal with hacking with reference to computers and information. No single book can employ the broadest possible definition of hacking. After you are done with this book, you will have a better idea of what constitutes hacking on computers. After you are done with this book, you will probably not be able to hack in to others’ computers, there are seldom good reasons for doing so, and this book is not for that. This book is  meant to fuel a curious mind, and expose it to the world of hack able objects. Before we can begin though we need to address the very subject of this book, ethical hacking.