Stay informed on the latest hacking trends, threats, and prevention strategies in cyber security with insightful articles and updates.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Hacking is the use of technical methods to access, alter, disrupt, or examine computer systems and data, either with authorization or without it. In security reporting, the term usually covers unauthorized exploitation of software flaws, exposed services, weak credentials, misconfigurations, and sometimes human trust through phishing or other social engineering.
Its security significance depends on the attacker’s access and objective: a compromised internet-facing system may enable data theft, unauthorized changes, or movement into other systems, while a benign penetration test can reveal the same weaknesses before they are abused. Defenders reduce exposure through timely vulnerability management, secure configuration, strong authentication, network and endpoint monitoring, and tested incident-response procedures. Useful reporting distinguishes confirmed compromise from attempted or suspected activity and identifies the exploited entry point, affected assets, and whether access was contained.
The semiconductor manufacturing giant's security team describes how hardware hackathons, such as Hack@DAC, have helped chip security by finding and sharing hardware vulnerabilities.
A state-sponsored hacking team employed a clever masquerade and elaborate back-end infrastructure as part of a five-year info-stealing campaign that compromised the US State and Treasury Departments, and hundreds of thousands of accounts overall.