There are always terms flown around in the Cyber Security world. A lot of the time you will hear about the White Hat Hackers and what they do but you may not hear about the 6 other different types who can be dangerous to you and your organisation. Here are the different types of hacker “hats” there are:
Script Kiddie
Script Kiddies generally do not care to hack and steal things. They are generally known as hacker amateurs and will copy code and use it for viruses, SQLi or other purposes. they generally will download software to perform hacking, and you will generally see two different types of attacks from them; DoS or DDoS.
White Hat
These hackers as we all know are “ethical hackers” and they are the good guys who want to help people and organisations. They will help with finding your security gaps, help you with viruses etc.
Black Hat
Also known as crackers, are the types of people/organisations you will hear about in the news or read about in the papers. These guys generally have very deep knowledge of computer networking, network protocols, and system admin. They are unethical hackers and generally will find weaknesses and gaps in firms like banks and will steal things like credit card information, confidential data or money.
Grey Hat
Unlike the black hat hackers, the grey hat hackers don’t steal information or money and don’t help people like white hat hackers. Instead, these guys will just spend the majority of their time having a play around with systems without doing anything harmful.
Green Hat
This group is sometimes referred to as the babies (almost like a trainee/graduate/intern), generally new to the hacking world they will use scripting (similar to the script kiddie), however, they have the aspiration of being a full hacker.
Red Hat
This group has many different nicknames, one of them being the vigilantes. These guys are like the white hat hackers where they like to put a stop to the black hat hackers however they do it in a much crazier (almost scary) way! Red hat hackers are known to use a very aggressive approach in targeting the black hat hackers, and potentially kill their computers too!
Blue Hat
This group of hackers is generally the ones who are out with a vengeance on anyone who has made them angry. They seek revenge, and similar to the script kiddie are quite new to the hacking world and unlike the green hat hackers, the blue hats don’t want to learn.
There you have it, the list of the different hacker hats and what they all do. I hope this has helped some of those out there who are confused or not know what they different hacker hat groups are.
Written By Tulin Sevgin, Cyber Risk Lead, InConsult