Week 6: White Hat Hackers.

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The term "White Hat" is a name given to hackers that use their skills to benefit companies and organizations by letting them know where they are vulnerable to their not-so-helpful hacker brethren. When I think of hackers I think of the movie Die Hard 4.0, Timothy Olyphant plays a hacker that partially succeeds in taking down the USA with his scary hacking skills (before Bruce Willis gets in the way), I believe in the film Olyphants character used to a White Hat or something similar before he was disgraced and turned to the dark side. Because organizations may not have the resources capable of testing their security systems themselves it makes more sense to hire outside their organization and this is where White Hats come in. For obvious reasons a White Hat has to be completely trustworthy because the organization is paying them find their weaknesses and not to take advantage of them. The idea of White Hats makes sense because in other areas of our lives we try to account for the worst, we test the safety of cars in crash simulations, not because we plan on crashing but because we know it's a possibility and if it does happen we want as little damage as possible to occur.

Palmer, C.C 2001, Ethical Hacking, IBM Sytems Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3.