Ethical Hacking is a practice of probing software or applications, performed by a hacker, to find irregularities and vulnerabilities in their product. The hired company or individual identify all possible threats that they find by trying to bypass their system’s security. These threats can be exploited by attackers with malicious intent. The threats are then reported in order to minimize any potential security risks.
What Separates Unethical Hacking from the Ethical?
Companies or individuals will explicitly hire people for hacking into their system for the sole intention of finding security vulnerabilities. This means that they give explicit consent to the hacker.
There are also some guidelines a hacker must follow in order to remain ethical. Once a system is penetrated, a hacker may have access to files or data they don’t have permission to view. It is their responsibility to ignore this extra information or declare to the employer that this data is also at risk.
Once you’re done with work, you close out all openings, not leaving any potential risks from your own actions for someone to take advantage of later.
The main purpose of your job will be to report all security vulnerabilities you find. Holding back on information may lead to trouble on your end and you may end up with lawsuits.
Ethical Hacking Training
The International Council of E-commerce or EC-Council offers legitimate certification for anyone wanting to pursue Ethical Hacking Training. The position awarded is that of a Certified Ethical Hacker or CEH. The exam costs $500 to take and the version 8 has 125 multiple choice questions.
The courses offered by the EC-Council span over 20 modules and cover 340 technologies used by hackers. Students have access to 2200 other resources used by hackers to be enabled to think like a hacker. Over 140 labs too are designed to simulate real-time hacking scenarios for Ethical Hacking Training.
This has brought ethical hacking into the forefront of digital security in the IT industry has as made itself a huge commodity for safety and security. The threat to one’s personal data and having it leak from company resources has been very real over the past few years.
We have seen many stories related to thousands of user data being leaked or hacked into by unethical hackers such as the whole recent Facebook scandal. The job of an ethical hacker is the prevent something like this to ever happen. Because of the demand, ethical hackers can make anywhere from $24,000 to $132,000 a year. Ethical Hacking Training should therefore be considered as a serious education because it can be adopted as an eventual career path.
Certified Ethical Hacker
Ethical Hacking As A Career
Hacking has a negative connotation attached to it and many people see it as a crime attached profession. What many people don’t realize is that penetration testing is imperative to security and has uncovered many threats that would have proved to be catastrophic had it not been for the work of an ethical hacker.
