Hacking has Evolved

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Hacking has evolved into helping shape the Information Security Industry.

Back in the ’90s, hackers were considered criminals, no one wanted to interact with them without understanding that a ‘hacking ethos’ could be applied to things that weren’t “Illegal”.

As years went by, today it’s completely legitimized when used for a good cause. Events like ‘Hackbama’, ‘Blackhat’, ‘Defcon’ the world’s most notable hackers conventions started in 1993 and continue even to our days, because of how hacking has evolved today.

People want to visit such events reaching over 30K attendances per event to see what ‘hackers’ are working on, what sort of security breaches have been discovered, new techniques, that will help vendors of software and hardware create better and more secure equipment for our industry.

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Organizations from across the world including: Federal law enforcement agents from the FBI, DoD, United States Postal Inspection Service, DHS, and other agencies regularly attend these events, including computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, students, and hackers with a general interest in software, computer architecture, hardware modification, conference badges, anything else that can be “hacked” and to improve their knowledge.

Such events consist of several tracks of speakers about the computer and hacking related subjects, as well as Cyber-Security challenges and competitions, talking and learning from hackers, sharing their information to improve the Information Security World, after realizing that hackers have a role to keep the ‘infrastructure’ of governments, industries, corporations, companies, and the world in general safe.

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Online Platforms such as HackerOne, BugCrowd powered by some of the best hackers around, partner up with top companies across the world to invite hackers to hack their systems and offer huge amounts of Bounties. If you are not well trained from the offensive side, it will be very hard to understand how to perform the techniques used by hackers. It is a place of vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform that connects businesses with penetration testers and security researchers.

What separates a criminal from a hacker, is their motive and code of ethics. Offensive Security is playing a major role in the Information Security Industry and hacking has shaped and changed the Cyber Security landscape, evolving it into one of the most desired positions today.

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