What Is Hacking?

Despite what teenage girls or mothers on Facebook would have you believe, hacking is not accessing a computer after someone neglected to log out from it. A true hacker would never need you to forget to log out of your account nor would they need to even be at your location. They would get your account information remotely without any assistance from you at all. A hacker would also not need to phish for your information, phishing is a type of scam where a person pretends to be someone they are not to get your information, here is a good example.

The term hack is getting dangerously close to generic use as of late, there are "lifehacks", "kitchenhacks"...typically anything that makes an existing tasks even remotely faster is now considered a hack. The new generalization of hack and hacking takes away from the true hackers, and these are people that know far more about computers than you ever could. Commonly accepted uses of the term hacker taken from Wiki are:

•  People committed to computer security, primarily concerns those who work debugging or fixing security problems (White hats), differentiate from the morally ambiguous Grey hats and the illegal computer criminals, who perform unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats).
• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts.The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular."
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (video games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and created the personal computing industry.

We will focus on the computer security defined hacker here. These hackers will examine and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network, typically motivated by profit, protest, challenge or personal enjoyment. Hackers are essentially experts in computer or network security. Recent examples of websites actually being hacked are:

• State of Montana notifies 1.3 million patients of breach to Department of Public Health and Human Services server.
• Popular messaging app Yo gets breached.

PC World also recently released an informative map that shows in real time what it looks like when the web is hacked. Despite the bastardization of the term hacker, it is best that you do know what you are dealing with when encountering actually being hacked.