Phishing and hacking are two related cyber activities. Both methods can cause harm, damage, and financial loss to individuals and businesses.
Phishing uses social engineering to manipulate people into sharing sensitive information like passwords, or bank account details. While hacking uses various tools and techniques to gain unauthorised access to systems and networks for malicious purposes.
In this article, we’ll start by discussing hacking and phishing individually, then we’ll compare them to see how they differ.
What is Hacking?
A hacker uses a computer system to gain unauthorised access into another system for reasons like stealing money, fame, or making a network unavailable.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane;
Historical records state that the first semblance of hacking happened in the 1800s; though it is not what we understand hacking to be today. It happened that after the invention of the telephone and the establishment of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone company, young phone operators pranked callers by switching telephone lines.
This history lesson is a reminder of how vulnerabilities within any system could be exploited for personal gain.
The term hacking/hacker originated in 1955 from MIT. MIT students pulled elaborate pranks called hacks on their campus, like when they decorated the Great Dome, an iconic landmark, by turning it into R2D2, a fictional Star Wars character or when they placed a campus police cruiser on its roof.
The definition of hacking has now evolved and it was only in 1963 that it was connected to computing. An MIT newspaper wrote a piece on telephone hackers, stating that telephone services have been curtailed due to hackers.
These hackers often students were tying up phone lines between Harvard and MIT, as they were experimenting with how telephone switching worked. They would sometimes re-route calls, or redirect calls confusing both callers and operators, which caused MIT to shut down the phone lines.
There was one instance, where a student was reportedly expelled weeks before graduation for such activities.
In the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of personal computers, hacking became even more popular. For example, in the 1990s, Kevin Mitnick was famous for infiltrating networks and stealing software by using social engineering techniques to gain unauthorised access to computer systems.
Hacking continues to evolve, and there have been many more cases where various techniques have been used to exploit vulnerable systems. Here are a few popular techniques:
Malware: This is a digital parasite that can take control of your device and cause harm or steal data.
XXS (Cross-site scripting): This is when a malicious script is injected into web pages allowing hackers to steal cookies sessions, tokens or other sensitive information.
Phishing: This is "the art of Deception", tricking people into handling over personal and sensitive information.
DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service): This is when a website or service gets more traffic than it can handle, and this traffic is flooded by an attacker/attackers to render the service unusable.
Drive-By Downloads: This occurs when a user visits an infected website which downloads and installs malware automatically.
Man in the Middle: This involves intercepting communication between systems. For instance, the man in the middle eavesdrops on a conversation between two unsuspecting users, this middleman can alter conversations between these individuals, redirect transactions, and steal data.
Zero-Day Exploits: This involves taking advantage of vulnerabilities unknown to a software vendor or developers.
DNS Spoofing: Also known as DNS cache poisoning, it involves altering DNS records to redirect traffic from legitimate websites to malicious websites.
Ransomware: Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a victim's data making it inaccessible until a ransom is paid. This is simply a hacking technique where data is held hostage.
Key Loggers: This involves capturing every keystrokes made on a computer using keylogging software. Keyloggers record keystrokes made on a computer to capture information like passwords, credit card details, etc
Password Attacks: This is one of the most common techniques, and hackers can exploit systems due to weak passwords. e.g. credential stuffing, and dictionary attacks.
Watering Hole Attack: This involves compromising websites frequently visited by groups by infecting them with malware.
Session Hijacking: This involves taking over active sessions. It is when an attacker steals a user's session token gaining unauthorised access to their accounts due to unsecure networks.
SQL Injection: A database is used to store various types of data, and SQL injection involves exploiting vulnerable databases by inserting malicious SQL code into queries to access, modify or delete data.
Brute Force Attacks: Involves guessing passwords by trying different possible combinations often using automated tools. If an individual's or entity's password is weak, it makes it easier for the attacker to gain access to sensitive information or perform unauthorised transactions.
Social Engineering: Humans are vulnerable which makes us easy targets. Social engineering involves manipulating human behaviour to give out important information.
Now that we have explored some of the kinds of hacking techniques available, let’s take a look at the;
