In the early days of hacking, the primary purpose of hacking was to disrupt the workflow of an organization, business or government. At the time, we had PC computers and mobile devices, smart phones and tablets were not in wide usage. Viruses, worms and Trojan Horses were the common types of malware. It was relatively easy to disrupt a person’s usage of computers by damaging the operating system which was stored on a hard drive. The operating system is copied from the hard drive into memory and runs from memory. Thus, a virus can be loaded in memory and change the files resident on the hard drive. This causes the PC to be unusable because the operating system has been changed. Current computing devices such as smart phones and tablets have the operating system “burned” into a chip and cannot be changed unless the chip, called a SoC (Software on a Chip), is rooted. Even though the operating system is burned into a chip it can be changed by erasing the code from the chip electrically (EEPROM) and reloading the OS into the chip. Now, most hackers are after information and would rather steal information to either use it for monetary gain or to affect the operations of the government. For example, ransomware is currently the most dangerous type of malware in existence. The hacker can encrypt an organizations data and then blackmail them to provide the key to decrypt the data. Hackers will steal medical information to scam Medicare. Other hackers will steal emails to embarrass political opponents.
Minimum of 7 to 8 pages and 6 references. The page count does not include title page and reference pages. Please use the 7th ed. APA student paper formatting for your research papers. Be sure you have an introduction and a summary with appropriate topics in between. One final note, I do not like direct quotes (copy and paste) from your sources. You should research your topic, read the references and then paraphrase your sources. You are still required to cite your sources. Every reference requires a citation within the body of the paper and every citation requires a reference.
