White symbolizes purity, black represents evil. In Westerns, the hero wears a white hat, the villain a black one. “White hat” means legitimate practice, “black hat” means practices that violate rules. Black hat also refers to hackers who break into computer systems without authorization to do harm. Gray hat refers to hackers who don’t fit neatly into either category.
White symbolizes goodness and purity in some cultures, while its opposite, black, represents evil. In the United States, this symbolism was revived in the genre of television and films called Westerns. In these shows, the costumes can often help viewers readily identify the hero and villain by giving the former a white hat and the latter a black hat. From this association derive the terms “white hat” for orthodox, respectable and legitimate practice, or practice in the service or good and “black hat” for practices that violate rules and guidelines or are carried out with malice.
Being a reference to the good guys, the white hat has had much more currency for a long time. Recently, however, the black hat has seen an increase in usage as it has come to refer to two types of people: one in the realm of search engine optimization (SEO); the other in the IT security sector. In the world of SEO, there are some practices that are designed to purposely interfere with and subvert a search engine’s ability to rate articles as they are designed. Such practices include title tag stuffing and stacking, cloaking, spamdexing, link farms, free for alls (FFAs), and linking schemes, in short, any practice or technique aimed at not targeting the viewer , but to influence the search engines evaluation of the page value and the manipulation of the search engine rankings of the page.
In the field of computer security, hackers or black hat crackers break into computer systems and networks without authorization to do so. While the motivation differs: black hat hackers may break into systems with the intent to inflict harm, just because they can, or on behalf of some cause, whether political or social, the end result is usually something destructive. Black hat hackers can steal data, destroy files, publish the vulnerability publicly or to other hackers without notifying the system administrator. They can also unleash various computer plagues, including spam, viruses and worms, or remove copy protection.
Black hat operations contrast not only with white hat, but also with gray hat. The gray hat refers to a hacker who doesn’t neatly fall into the black hat or white hat categories. A gray hat can, for example, breach a system without the owner’s permission or knowledge – a black hat practice – but it doesn’t damage or actually fix the security breach – more in the realm of the white hat. Because their operations aren’t sanctioned, however, they don’t really fit the white hat moniker.
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