Question

Ethical hacking positive and negative effects on human beings

Answer 1

Research involving human subjects is littered with a history of scandal that often shapes people’s views of the ethics of research. Often the earliest cited case is English physician Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, where he injected an eight-year-old child with the pus taken from a cowpox infection and then deliberately exposed her to an infected carrier of smallpox.

Although Jenner’s experiment was, fortunately, successful, the method of exposing a child to a deadly disease in this way would undoubtedly nowadays be seen as unacceptable. Perhaps the most notorious cases of unethical research were revealed during the Nuremberg trials concerning Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This “research” included involuntary sterilisation, inducing hypothermia, and exposing subjects to diseases such as tuberculosis.

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Answer 2

With the development of information technology, Internet is becoming more and more important in our daily life. Thus, people are paying more attention to hacking. Hacking means breaking into a system using known security vulnerabilities. However, hacking is different from cracking, which means breaking into a system and doing crime. Hacking, instead, still has some positive effects.

Positive side of hacking:

Hackers are always very familiar with computer systems and can easily find the security vulnerabilities, but not all hackers do dirty works. For example, some hackers are hired by an organization that trusts him or her to attempt to penetrate networks and/or computer systems for the purpose of finding and fixing computer security vulnerabilities. They are known as ethical hackers. These hackers help examining the system or software using hacking method and tell customers so that they can close the hole and prevent potential losses.

Besides, there are also some hackers called “grey hat hacker”. These hackers may hack into a computer system to notify the administrator that their system is vulnerable and then offer to repair their system for a small fee. They are doing it for a good purpose but still demanding personal gain. It may not be ethical but is neither harmful.

Negative side of hacking:

Though hacking can be positive, we should never neglect its negative side. And in this condition, we should call it cracking. Crackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network with malicious intent or for personal gain. If a business website is hacked, it may lose not only essential data but also a great number of customers because the website is not operational during that period. If the website sells productions online, it will suffer more. And the website may even get a bad reputation if it is chosen as crackers’ target for many times because some customers think the website is not well designed. Besides, cracking may also cause business or government put additional costs on restoring hacked websites or protecting websites from potential cracking. While on the individual level, crackers may also able to gain unauthorized access into our computers to steal what we have stored, such as credit card numbers, bank account details, address books or other personal, financial or business information.

Everything in the world has its good side as well as bad side, and hacking is not an exception. There is no way for us stop crackers doing bad things, but as a future computer engineer, we can always choose to stand on the good side.