What is a White hat hacker?

A white hat hacker is someone who attempts to hack into varied computer systems in an attempt to discover any potential security flaws in those systems. White hat hackers are also known as “ethical” hackers, because they hack into systems so that they can help discover security flaws before real non-ethical hackers actually exploit those security flaws and compromise the security of those computer systems and possibly the associated users of those computer systems.

White hat hackers and bounty programs

Many white hack hackers actually make some extra money by reporting flaws to big companies like Google, Facebook, etc. And, in return for reporting those bugs, they receive some reward money from those companies – which is called a “bounty”.

What is a black hat hacker?

As you can probably guess, a black hat hacker is the opposite of a white hack hacker, because black hat hackers are the unethical hackers we discussed earlier, who exploit security flaws in computer systems.

Example of white hat hacker in a sentence

"The white hat hacker received $20,000 from Facebook for 
reporting a major flaw that allowed hackers to retrieve 
someone's profile by exploiting the password reset text
message that gets sent out to users."

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