this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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That's what you think is good about hacking? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. That's what you get when you get your education from TV.
Hacking means "misusing/modifying crap to work how you want".
Ethical hacking is e.g. modifying devices you own to run software you want, like e.g. running homebrew software on a game console. It is finding and reporting security vulnerabilities so that companies can improve their security. It is modifying software or devices to e.g. removing privacy problems or tracking.
And ethical hacking and law-abiding hacking aren't the same either, since some ethical hacking activities might be illegal (e.g. violating restrictions on modifying devices) and some legal hacking activities might not be ethical (e.g. using legal hacking to dox people).
I prefer saying 'grey hat' instead of 'ethical hacker' because ethical hacker is now used to mean 'pentester', 'red teamer' and all the other cybersecurity stuff, or so it seems to me.
that was the entire meaning of my comment, I clearly didn't make it clear enough.
All of that is under the umbrella term of ethical hacker. Black/grey/white hat are some very outdated and unclear terms, and also terms that non-tech people don't really understand.
Ethical hacker is a term that lay people also understand and because of that it has replaced the rest of these terms.
(And also, "ethical hacker" encompasses both the grey and white hat. So it's not an equivalent term to "grey hat".)