Where Cybercrime meets Criminal Justice
As the Internet has become more accessible to average people, the criminal justice system has had to play catch-up to keep up with the new and exciting crimes being committed. Things like shutting down the website for a business through a DDOS has no feasible (or almost no feasible) alternative in the pre-internet age. One of the most interesting points, in my opinion, where the law meets cybercrime is that of so called “white hat” or ethical hackers. The good guys in old westerns always seemed to wear white hats, and the same trope is used here. Techopedia defines white hat hackers as “… a computer security specialist who breaks into protected systems and networks to test and asses their security”. In essence, a company will hire out people to try and hack into or compromise their network, to pinpoint vulnerabilities or weak points in their cyber security programs. Presumably, the company will take the knowledge the white hats give to them and reinforce those points of weakness against future, malicious attacks. The interesting legal point here is that these hackers do the same thing as malicious hackers (trying to gain unauthorized access to a website) yet, because they’re hired by the company, they aren’t treated as criminals. It speaks to the idea that society can construct crimes that aren’t necessarily immoral similar to drug use. We’ve drawn, somewhat arbitrarily, a line in the sand as to what is and is not acceptable. Another thing these ethical hackers are used for is testing for bugs in systems. Facebook, as one example, has what is called a bug bounty program. These kinds of programs reward hackers, or just astute coders in general, for finding and reporting bugs or flaws in a company’s code. These programs can help deter cybercrime by making it (hopefully) more worthwhile to report a security flaw to the company than it would be to exploit the vulnerability, and can be a viable source of income thanks to websites like Hackerone that compile bug bounty boards in one place for easy searching.
References
What is a White Hat Hacker? – Definition from Techopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved April 5, 2019, from https://www.techopedia.com/definition/10349/white-hat-hacker