I hack, therefore I am. Some base their entire existence on the term “hacker”. For many it is a badge of honor. The term hacker means many things to many people. For the public, it often means “bad”.

In the past decade, there have been hundreds of data breaches resulting in millions of compromised records. The motivation behind these hacks? Identity Theft. As a result dozens of new laws and government intervention to protect citizen data.

Black, White or Grey, over the past decade the media has given the term “hacker” a negative connotation. Or is it hackers that gave the term a negative connotation? Just asking!? Either way, whenever I’m talking bad guy hacker I’m careful to precede the word hacker with “criminal” so I don’t piss off anyone who considers themselves a good guy hacker.

Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Graham Bell were all hackers. Good ones too.

Hackers in general take pride in their skills, as they should. They are often a head above the rest, on top of what is new and ahead of what’s next in technology. Many are self-taught and many hone their skills with additional formal training.

In the past the word “Cracker” has been tossed around and never quite stuck when referring to criminal hackers. And of course “scriptkddie,” referring to bad hackers that are just trying to make a name for themselves. We don’t hear that term much anymore due to the fact that most mischievous hackers are generally criminal because they are breaking the law.

What many are beginning to realize is there is a battle going on 24/7/365 between the whitehats and the blackhats. President Obama has chimed in with a directive to review the nations cyber security as it relates to security and our critical infrastructures. You are either a (criminal) hacker or a hackee. Predator or prey.

The US Federal Aviation Administration, the bureau that would have been in the best position to stop 9/11, recently disclosed a breach in a server that was hacked.

Very recently reports came in from a Romanian-based blog bragging about scriptkiddie-type accomplishments that the criminal hackers had compromised sites owned by Kaspersky Security, F-Secure and BitDefender. To what degree they were compromised and if was considered a real threat is unknown. They all reported data was not stolen. Initial reports include hacks known as SQL injections and cross-site scripting, which affects applications and can steal data.

All this means the criminal hackers are not messing around. While this all may be over the heads of most hackees, it’s a real problem that everyone should and, unfortunately, will continue to become more familiar with. As a citizen who uses various technologies, you need to make a concerted effort to understand what you are up against and put systems in place to protect yourself.