What Do Hackers Want?

As the preceding section mentioned, hackers approach their craft from a number of motivations. Their goals might differ, but they all have the goal of gaining power and control of a computer system or network. Many of their intermediate steps are therefore the same.

The computer attack and infiltration process is organized around the following steps:

These steps are discussed in upcoming sections. It is worth noting that, for coordinated and well-organized attacks on computer networks, a separate reconnaissance phase often precedes these steps. You'll learn some of these reconnaissance techniques in the section "Attacking a Network," later in this hour.