Professional Practices in Information Technology
CSC 110
ProfessionalPracticesin
Information Technology
HandBook
COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology
(Virtual Campus)
Islamabad, Pakistan
Professional Practices in Information Technology
CSC 110
Lecture 17
Introduction to Hacking
17.1 What Is Network Security?
Security is much larger than just packets, firewalls, and hackers. Security includes:
– Policies and procedures
– Liabilities and laws
– Human behavior patterns
– Corporate security programs and implementation
– Technical aspects firewalls, intrusion detection systems, proxies, encryption, antivirus
software, hacks, cracks, and attacks
Understanding hacking tools and how attacks are carried out is only one piece of the puzzle.
17.2 Hacking
The process of attempting to gain or successfully gaining, unauthorized access to computer
resources for the purpose of help or secure system is called hacking.
History of Hacking
– 1966 – Robert Morris introduces the concept of safe hacking.
– 1969 – Development in the field of hacking.
Professional Practices in Information Technology
CSC 110
– 1990 – Electronic frontier foundation was founded.
– 1995 – Mark Andreessen & Eric release mosaic
Who is Hacker?
Hacker is not cybercriminal but he is the very intelligent person who uses his knowledge in
constructive manner to secure system & never damage data. He knows all about the operating
system & different holes in the system
.
Who is cracker?
– Person who enter into other’s system and violet the system, damage the data, create havoc is
called cracker
– Cracker is cyber criminal
– They can be easily identified because their actions are malicious
Why do crackers exist?
– Crackers exist because human nature is just so, frequently driven by to destroy instead of
create
– They are used for different purposes like for profit, some company use them for disabling the
competitor company, for cracking credit card number
Difference between hacker & cracker
– Hacker’s programs to check integrity of other programs, thus when hackers create program it
Professional Practices in Information Technology
CSC 110
automatically checks remote machine security structure
– They always do constructive work
– Crackers rarely make their own program instead, they steal tool, programs from others
– Crackers creates nothing & destroy much
Which operating system hacker use
– Sun
– Unix
– Microsoft
Sun
– Hackers use either solaric x86 or sco as a platform.
– This is because these products are licensed ware & they can easily be obtained.
Unix
– Popular platform because they required a low overhead
– We can run linux on a paltray 386 and gain good performance.
– This is reasonable.
Microsoft
Professional Practices in Information Technology
CSC 110
– This supports many security tools that can be used to attack remote machine.
– It has advanced tools for networking as well.