What are the 6 types of Hackers?

When it comes to cybersecurity, things aren’t all that black and white (excuse the pun). Hackers’ hats come in a variety of colors:

• Black-Hat
• White-Hat
• Grey-Hat
• Green-Hat
• Blue-Hat
• Red-Hat

What are Black Hats?

Black hat hackers guys who want to use their technical skills to defraud and blackmail others. They usually have the expertise and knowledge to break into computer networks without the owners’ permission, exploit security vulnerabilities, and bypass security protocols. To make money or haram someone, they are ready to do all illegal activities such as:

• Phishing
• Writing, distributing, and selling malware like viruses, worms, trojan horses, etc.
• Deploying cyberattacks like distributed denial of service (DDoS) to slow down or crash the services.
• Deploying dangerous cyber threats like brute-force attacks, scareware, botnets, man-in-the-middle attacks, malvertising campaigns, etc.

They're using other illegal activities too!

What are White-Hats?

White-Hats are also known as Ethical Hackers. Instead of Black-Hats, White-Hats are the "good guys" and Black-Hats are the "bad guys", like in Star Wars :). Companies often hire white-hats to test software, which means they do so only with the owner's permission. White-hats use the same activities as black-hats. White-hats find security vulnerabilities, report them, and fix them. They also program tools that detect and then defend against cyberattacks.

What are Grey Hats?

These Grey-Hat hackers falls between white-hats and black-hats. Grey hat hackers’ intentions are often good, but they don’t always take the ethical route with their hacking technics. They do it mostly without owner's permission. They find & report the security vulnerabilities then like White-Hats.

What are Green Hats?

A Green Hat are new/beginners to the field of "hacking". Green Hat hackers are unaware of the security mechanisms and inner workings of the Internet, but they are eager learners and determined (and even desperate) to improve their position in the hacking community. While not necessarily intending to do harm, they may do so when "playing" with various malware and attack techniques.

As a result, "green hat" hackers can also be harmful because they are often unaware of the consequences of their actions-or, worse, do not know how to fix them.

What are Blue Hats?

Blue hat hackers (some blue hats are known as blue hat Microsoft hackers) perform penetration testing and deploy various cyber-attacks without causing damage. Microsoft often organizes such invite-only conferences to test Windows programs.

What are Red-Hats?

A red hat is like Robin Hood on the internet. A red-hat hacker could refer to someone who targets systems owning from a black-hat hacker, mostly. Rather than hand a black hat over to the authorities, red hats will launch aggressive attacks against them to bring them down, often destroying the black hat's computer and resources.