What are grey hat hackers and how are Grey hat hackers different from white hat hackers and black hat hacking?
Gray hat hackers are professionals that combine the practices of white and black hat hackers within the context of the ethical hacking domain. Organizations may employ a hybrid of ethical hackers from the black, white and grey hat hackers to get better results. Outside the ethical hacking practices, there are grey hat hackers who prey for vulnerabilities anywhere.
And these gray hat people hack without any malicious intention, most of the time for fun and out of curiosity. Moreover, they perform the hacking without any approval from the targeted organization and mostly provide reporting after their successful exploitation of their target. The legality of gray hat ethical hackers is highly contested. Besides, they do not render harm to the target organization as well and they conduct their hacking without written permission.
Gray hat hacker falls between white hat hackers and black hast hackers. Meaning, gray hat hackers take features from both black hat and white hat hacking techniques. These types of hackers look for security vulnerabilities in organizational assets without the permission or knowledge owners. Moreover, gray hat hackers may sometimes transgress laws or usual ethical standards, but they do not have the malicious motives typical of the black hat hackers. Black hackers are cybercriminals who attempts to break into information and information systems of an organization illegally for stealing information and intellectual property (IP). White hat hackers, like black hat hackers, attempt to break into networks and information systems but do so with a permission from the owner of the asset. Whereas grey hat hackers sit somewhere in between the black and the white hat hackers. These hackers break into information system without written permission from the owner of the asset illegally but with no known malicious intent. Grey hat hackers report their exploitation and may ask some amount of money for their work but usually do not stage malicious activities after they found out and exploit the weaknesses.