Child Molesters, Hackers and Indentity Thieves – Are they the Equally Dangerous Triplet of Web Villains?
posted in Main |Child molesters (also called child abusers, [tag]online sexual predators[/tag], etc) are in my opinion the most disgusting type of “online pirates” mentioned above. They target chidren who post their profiles on different social networking sites, popular teenage chats, etc. Starting the conversations with potential victims as if being the child of the same age, those predators not only use the information gathered during chats for their financial benefit, but they also blackmail children and use their knowledge of children psychology to take sexual advantage of children.
Luckily for the world’s safety and sanity, hackers are usually interested in system hacking only from the point of view of getting a financial gain. Stealing is wrong, yes, but it’s far less dangerous than using hacking skills to abuse children.
Unfortunately there are a few morons outhere who combine some level of hacking skills with psychological disorders, and they use their skills to molest children.
In my opinion those are the most dangerous online villains. Adrian Ringland, for example, was caught in 2006 for molesting girls in Britain and Canada. He posed in the chat rooms as a teenager and sent to 13-year old girls a Trojan Horse mascaraded as a picture of him. After “the picture” was downloaded, bastard gained remote control to the victims’ machines and searched for anything that could embarass girls. Then he used this material for successful blackmails.
You can learn more about this frightening case of child abuse from this article:Internet predator jailed for targeting teen girls. Of course, nobody says that identity thieves or hackers that are up to financial gains are angels, but at least they target adults. Other than that there is not much good left to say about identity thieves, either.
It’s probably worth noting that not all identity thieves are hackers. Identity thieves not necessarily hacked into personal computer (or some website’s database) to get victim’s data. They could instead use one of millions online scams that are spread out like a plague all over the Net.
Whereas child molesters and identity thieves deserve absolutely no leniency towards their maliciouis activities, and thus should be prosecuted as harsh as possible, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge hackers. At least, not until we define the types of hackers, their motives and intentions.
Based on their skills and mostly, based on their purposes, I divide hackers into 4 groups.
There are white hat hackers, grey hat hackers, black hat hackers (also called crackers) and script kiddies.
Only 2 groups can be considered a “villain” type: crackers and script kiddies. You might be surprised to learn this, but only those 2 types will launch attacks that will harm your online business.
Black hat hackers will certainly try to get some financial advantage, whereas script kiddies might either stole your data or deface your site, which is annoying but can be easily corrected.
I will talk about “good” types of hackers in the next post.
