Define the terms tiger team, white hat, black hat, and grey hat and discuss the difference between them.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Groups of hackers called tiger teams are sometimes used by corporate security departments to test their own security measures. By hiring hackers to break into the system from the outside, the company can identify weaknesses in the computer system's armor. These "good hackers" became known as white hats because of their role in helping organizations locate and fix security flaws. White hats do their work under contract, with agreement from the target firms that they will not be prosecuted for their efforts to break in. Hardware and software firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel, HP, and many others pay bounties of $25,000 to $250,000 to white hat hackers for discovering bugs in their software and hardware.

In contrast, black hats are hackers who engage in the same kinds of activities but without pay or any buy-in from the targeted organization, and with the intention of causing harm. They break into websites and reveal the confidential or proprietary information they find. These hackers believe strongly that information should be free, so sharing previously secret information is part of their mission.

Somewhere in the middle are the grey hats, hackers who believe they are pursuing some greater good by breaking in and revealing system flaws. Grey hats discover weaknesses in a system's security, and then publish the weakness without disrupting the site or attempting to profit from their finds. Their only reward is the prestige of discovering the weakness. Grey hat actions are suspect, however, especially when the hackers reveal security flaws that make it easier for other criminals to gain access to a system.