Based on their intention to hack a system, hackers can be divided into several categories such as white hat, black hat, and grey hat. These various terms are taken from vintage spaghetti westerns where the villain wears a black cowboy hat and the hero a white one.
White Hat Hackers.
Ethical hackers are another name for white hat hackers. As part of penetration testing and #vulnerability assessments, they never intend to harm a system; instead, they look for areas where a computer or network system may have vulnerabilities.
One of the hardest occupations in the IT business is ethical hacking, which is legal. Many businesses employ ethical hackers for penetration testing and vulnerability analysis.
Black Hat Hackers
Black Hat hackers, sometimes referred to as #crackers, are individuals who hack into a system without authorization in order to disrupt its operations or steal private data.
Due to its malicious goal, which includes stealing company data, invading privacy, destroying the system, preventing network connectivity, etc., black hat hacking is always prohibited.
Grey Hat Hackers
Black hat and white hat hackers combine to form grey hat hackers. Without the owner’s consent or knowledge, they use a security flaw in a computer system or network for enjoyment, acting without any harmful intent.
Their goal is to draw the owners’ attention to the weakness in exchange for gratitude or a small reward.
Red Hat Hackers
Black hat and white hat hackers combine once more to form red hat hackers. They typically hack into government institutions, top-secret information centers, and pretty much anything else that contains sensitive data.
Blue Hat Hackers
A system is bug-tested before it is released by a blue hat hacker, who works outside of computer security consulting businesses. They look for loopholes that can be exploited and try to close these gaps. Microsoft also uses the term Blue Hat to represent a series of security briefing events.