What Do Hackers Do?

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about "What do hackers do?" Well, hackers are a group of people that are interested in everybody else's computer. Fact, they want to spend all their time looking at your computer instead of messing with their own. I guess this is a certain breed of people that think that it is interesting to be able to go through cyberspace and look at other people's computers. So, they get obsessed with that. The term hacking comes from the fact that they can't get into your computer without your permission unless they do something that is going to hurt something. So that's where we get the term hack from. They're going to have to hack something like if you hacked a brush down with a machete. They kind of do the same thing when they go into your computer. They're going to have to come in and push their way pass some of your programs in order to get inside your computer. They do this in various ways. They can use little programs they've written to do it for them. If they're people that know how to write computer code. They could just go in and look through the networks until they find a computer that has what are called open ports. This open port would be a way for them to come in and look at your computer. So, hackers have various methods that they use. They use different programs and they do a lot of what we call scanning. They have what are called spiders that go out on the network and look at everybody's addresses. They have netbots, which come from the word robot; a little automated program that goes out and checks different items and comes back and tells them what the results are. So there's a lot of activity going on that is all stimulated by hackers who probably don't have much of a life and they're pretty bored so they like to spend their time looking at other people's computers without their permission."