I’ve written about this before, but a few days ago I was talking to a customer about the different kinds of hackers out there.  They were really surprised and interested, so I thought I would share.  Believe it or not, there are good hackers and bad hackers.  The Internet, and eventually your desktop, is a huge battlefield that’s in a constant state of war.  It’s extremely interesting once you really understand all the players and the playfield.

Your desktop is the final crown and trophy that is up for grabs in the largest advertising media of the world.  Getting in front of your eyes is the goal of all the hackers, businesses, advertisers, and the likes.  This is done by many methods; most of them cause headaches for you.

We all know about the bad hackers (black hat hackers), those annoying popups they create, and the junk spyware they put on your computer to control it.  What most don’t know is there are good hackers too (white hat hackers).  The black hats and white hats are fighting each other.  The bad guys want to enslave your computer; the good guys are fighting the bad guys.  The funny thing (at least to me, that is) is that quite often the black hats fight amongst themselves too.  Black Hat A wants your computer for himself and will anti-hack (is that a word?) Black Hat B.

The same is pretty much the same for legitimate businesses and advertising too.  These guys want you to buy from them, look at their ads, and ignore the competition.  Again, it’s big business to get in front of your face, as people are spending more time on the computer than watching the TV.  Everyone’s trying to take over each other, partner with each other, and eventually get all the business.

Microsoft comes up with Bing to battle Google (after Google rejected their buy-out offer).  Yahoo is trying not to get bought out itself.  AOL teams up with Time Warner, then it falls apart.  Google comes up with Chrome to swat back at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  The black hats are fighting the white hats, and then you have the GRAY hats!  Popups, spyware, SPAM!

Hackers turn your computer into a zombie to control it.  They get thousands of zombies and turn them into a botnet (a large group of compromised computers) and then they have their own battalion!  With that botnet they can now attack large web sites like Microsoft.com, send SPAM anonymously using you, and who knows what else.

It’s a scary place out there on the Internet, and sadly I don’t see it getting any better.  I predict that one day it’ll get so bad that they’ll scrap the whole thing and start with Internet 2.0.  But that’s a whole other controversial discussion.