Suicide Hacker: What Makes Them Special?

Hacking is a practice that goes beyond just good and bad in the modern world. Hacking by technical definition is something that is used to access something restricted and that makes it ‘bad’ in moral and legal compass. There are good and bad hackers just like there are superheroes and villains. Suicide hacker can be both good and bad, but we’re going to focus here on the widely known bad ones.

What is suicide hacker?

A suicide hacker is a hacker who hacks for the sake of destruction. Much like a suicide bomber, they are driven by bad intentions in majority of the cases. They are aware that they will cause harm and potentially will harm themselves as well.

In most scenarios of a suicide hacker, the person knows he/she would get caught. Nevertheless, they wouldn’t back out of the challenge and they would go all out.

Suicide hacking can be seen as something that will remain in a grey area of hacking. Some people of the digital world do not agree that suicide hacker should be classified as another type of hackers category and call them in general name: grey hat hackers.

What drives a suicide hacker?

A suicide hacker is driven by revenge or the will to harm a person. Such person doesn’t care if the damage comes back to them, they would do it anyway. Activities like this can be termed as psychopathic at some level.

But, when a person’s mind is set to destruction, there is no limit to what they could do. Mix this intention with the solid knowledge and skills in hacking and you will get an extremely dangerous hacker.

Such type of hacker will do everything to complete the goal.

Famous suicide hackers

Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Morris created a worm by his name- The Morris Worm back in 1988. He was enrolled at Cornell University at that time. It was a recurring worm which was meant to destroy as much as possible.

The thing about Morris worm was that they computers could be re-infected with it. And, each time a computer got infected, it got slower and slower. His worm did so much damage and damaged over 6000 computers (6000 computers was a lot of computers in 1988).

The Morris worm did so much damage and he eventually got caught. For all we know, he might have even destroyed his computer in the process. As a punishment, he was sentences to a large sentence of probation, community service as well as a substantial $10,000 fine.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange was only 16 when he started hacking with the alias “Mendax”. He was incredibly gifted at hacking and even managed to hack into networks in the Pentagon, NASA, Citibank, Stanford University, and Lockheed Martin among others.

Assange created WikiLeaks in 2006, for leaking out info from any classified documents he could find. His action was not only a huge story a few year back but also one of the most famous known hacking incidents. The WikiLeaks news ran around the world and his hacking can be termed as suicide hacking in a way. His intention was to do good, morally speaking by leaking government info to the public. But, that is against the law and not how the society or a nation progresses.