Cyber threats are rapidly turning into a bigger and bigger issue as individuals and entities with malicious intents seek to exploit the even faster growing dependency of modern society on tech. Such incidents also make for very engaging headlines.

Wikibon has been looking into this area, and on a deeper level has also been looking at the people to be hold accountable. The latest post meticulously ranks the hackers by their impact on the Cybersecurity world, expanding on each category.

Script Kiddies and Black Hat Hackers

Wikibon separated these two categories, though they’re not very far apart. So-called script kiddies use code written by black hackers to carry out mischief, while the latter category does the same, even though they get more credit. LulzSec’s threats and actual breaches have been taken quite seriously, though they haven’t posed  a serious compromise to national security just yet.

Corporate Hackers: The Good Guys and Bad Guys

There are two types of corporate hackers: White Hat hackers are on payroll to strengthen a company’s cyber defenses, while corporate-sponsored hackers are instead hired to breach the defenses of a competitor. The legal difference is clearly much greater than the terminological one, as News Corp discovered.

Hactivists

The hactivist is a more sophisticated breed of the black hat hacker that purses a specific agenda, usually motivated by any number of controversial topics such as politics and religion. Anonymous fell into that category a number of times this year, with one example being its reaction to the Wikileaks developments.

Cyber Terrorists/State-Sponsored Hackers

These two types of hackers operate in a league of their own, targeting public infrastructure and classified data. Suspected state-sponsored espionage has not yet escalated to state-sponsored  cyber terrorism, as least as far as we can tell.

Wikibon discussed each of the categories more thoroughly on their blog, which contains analysis and commentary on countless other elements in the IT industry as well. We’ve been working with them for quite some time now.