The Digital Civil War
It is an age old battle in the physical world of white Vs. black. The war has now transfered over to our world, the world of the circuit and the switch, and it has been a force to compete with. On one side you have what are commonly know as "white hat hackers", the color white chosen to symbolize something pure and good. White hats do not damage computers and work for the advancement of security and computer use through a legal non-malicious form. Most white hats either know what they're doing and can code a great deal or they are white hat by force and not by choice.
Then you have the other end of the rainbow which is the more despised version of hackers, the black hat. Black hats are more malicious in use and will use everything possible to achieve their goals, within certain ethics created by more advanced black hats to be followed by all hackers. Never the less black hats come from all reaches of the digital universe. Blackhats exist from your lamest kid experimenting with OOB netbios attacks or syncronized floods, to a digital super hero who can program while he sleeps and can successfully penetrate even the hardest of networks undetected. You will rarely hear of the better half of the black hats because it does not provide a good general scare tactic for the media to use and capitalize on. Black hats can be considered a threat to national security and are at a constant war with authoritive figures. Then there are the breed of black hats that constitute both of these groups, they come from the low skilled to the high skilled, they are called the defacers. Most defacers tend to hover towards windows based operating systems because they do in fact provide the easiest target. Then you get to the more advanced defacers who tend to hover towards the open-source OS family, Linux, Solaris, BSDi. These types of defacers are in deed more skilled than your run of the mill script kid in some cases. Some defacers tend to hover towards mass scanning for a host since you multiply the odds of finding a vulnerable box by the hundreds. Others will tend to target a site and use tactical measures to gain entry to the box.
White hats tend to not get along with black hats for the most part. They see us as a threat to their entire existance, they create and we destroy, they bring peace and we wage cyber wars. Once in a while a white hat will fall through the cracks over to the black hat side. At other times the black hat will turn white hat either through choice or through some form of law enforcement intervention. The changes are up to the hacker to make based on his ideals and opinions. White hats and black hats have been at odds for as long as i can remember. White hats will judge an an entire black hat culture based on a select few individuals and discriminate against those who have skill based on their group affiliation. Black hats will rip out each and every nail that white hats have bore into the infrastructure holding this digital world together and for that black hats are shunned.
We are the black hats, we are the foot soldiers of the digital apocalypse. We bring destruction but at a costly price. We are willing to help people with security, but who wants a hacker that has a record of deceit and breaking into systems working within their network. You create and we build upon your creations to make them better and yet you shun us. I am a black hat and this is the digital dark ages, you are the danzels and we are the dragons, we will eat everything you know as pure. No matter what the color we are hackers, you can shun us, ban us, lock us up, but you can never defeat us, for every 1 white hat there are 10 black hats. We exist in the shadows only to be seen by aliases plastered across the digital walls. We are the soldiers of misfortune and we are here to destroy you.