The myth about Hacking
We often misunderstand the idea of “Hacking” and there are certain things come to our mind when we think of Hacker – a person sitting in front of a computer in a dark room typing infinite no of words per minute and gaining confidential information or letting viruses in cyberspace within seconds, but in reality, this not how things work. We are not to blame for this, the media around us projected the idea of hacking in this way.
In real world, hacking might work very differently than you expect. Hacking refers to activities that seek to comprise digital devices such as computers, smart phones and even complete networks and importantly hacking is not only used for malicious criminal activities but to improve securities of networks, that’s where ethical hacking comes in.
Ethical Hacking
Ethical hacking involves a white hat hacker (an information security expert) who attempts to gains unauthorized access to computer system, network or application on behalf on its owners – with their authorization. The purpose of this is to evaluate the security and the identify the possible vulnerabilities in computer networks or system infrastructure where malicious hackers could exploit the data.
How is ethical hacking different from illegal hacking?
Ethical hackers (white hat hackers) hack the system and reports the identified vulnerabilities where the system can be comprised to the organization and also additionally provide the solution for the vulnerabilities and performs a security test until the issues are fully resolved. Ethical hackers use their hacking knowledge to secure and improve technology of organizations. Whereas, Malicious hackers (black hat hackers) attempts to gain unauthorized to access to computer networks or application with an intend of money or personal recognition, some malicious hackers deface websites or crash serves for fun or some personal intention. These attacks result in great reputational damage to the organizations which causes them financial loss, loss of customers or some legal action for the leaked data. Also the methods used by black hat hackers remain unreported and gives the organization a less chance of finding the vulner1abilities which was exploited. So to avoid this, organizations hire Ethical hackers and they play an important role to improve the security of technology created by organizations.
The work of Ethical hackers
Ethical hackers after assessing the organization’s IT assets and gaining lot of information on how the vulnerabilities can be exploited, they aim to imitate a malicious hacker and use the exploits against the vulnerabilities in IT assets to prove how the system can be exploited by malicious hackers and some of the most common methods used are
* Injection attacks
* Broken authentication
* Security misconfigurations
* Use of components with known vulnerabilities
* Sensitive Data
Ethical hacking is not a criminal activity and should not be considered as such as malicious hacking, instead it used to prevent data being exploited and misused by malicious hackers. Ethical hacking is in line with industry regulation and improving the security of organizations.
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