Black hat (computer security)

While hacking has become an important tool for governments to gather intelligence, black hats tend to work alone or with organized crime groups for financial gain.

Black hat hackers can be involved in cyber espionage or protests in addition to pursuing personal or financial gain.

The creation of decryption tools by security experts within days limited the extortion payments to approximately $120,000, or slightly more than 1% of the potential payout.

[10] The notable data breaches typically published by major news services are the work of black hat hackers.

In a data breach, hackers can steal the financial, personal, or digital information of customers, patients, and constituents.

From 2013 to 2014, black hat hackers broke into Yahoo and stole 3 billion customer records, making it possibly the largest data breach ever.

[12] A data breach that occurred between May and July 2017 exposed more than 145 million customer records, making the national credit bureau Equifax another victim of black hat hacking.

[12] One of the most famous black hat methods is to utilize nasty "doorway pages", which are intended to rank highly for specific search queries.

Doorway pages are designed to deceive search engines so that they cannot index or rank a website for synonymous keywords or phrases.

Spamdexing is a form of black hat SEO that involves using software to inject backlinks to a website into search engine results.

Many organizations engage white hat hackers to enhance their network security through activities such as vulnerability assessments.

[16] A grey hat is a hacker who typically does not have malicious intent but often violates laws or common ethical standards.