What is Ethical Hacking?

‘Hacking’ is a word with a negative connotation. It is used to describe a computer user who has malicious intentions and wants to hack or break into the computer systems to do all possible wrong things. This includes stealing valuable data, erasing or modifying the data, taking down/shutting down a working website or software, disrupt services, and so on. And obviously, this person uses all the cunning tricks to get entry into the system by cracking the passwords or by circumventing different authorization systems. When you hear the term Ethical Hacking you may ask a question that “What is Ethical about Hacking?”

Ethical Hacking

No doubt, Hacking is a process of breaking into computer systems. However, this can be done with a noble purpose. We watching good police officers go two steps ahead of the thieves by thinking like them. Ethical hacking is like that: Thinking and Acting like a hacker. But, not to harm anybody or with malicious intent. Someone who is certified in this trade is called a Certified Ethical Hacker.

Ethical hacking is an authorized and legal practice of using all the tools and tricks to find vulnerabilities or weak spots in the devices, systems, servers, networks, etc. Finding out these weak spots is called penetration testing. Security engineers do this acting like a good cop.

Security engineers find out all the weak spots before any hacker can exploit them and penetrate into the system. In this way, they strengthen the defense. They use different tools to attack their own systems, collect data and analyze it. Come up with strategies to plug any holes and improve the security further. And this is the reason why there is a lot of demand for security engineers or ethical hackers.

Securing an information system is not one time task. If this is like a web application hosted and available on the internet, the chances of it being attacked are far more.  Hackers with malicious intentions can perform many different types of attacks.

Common Types of Security Attacks

Phishing is one very common type of attack. Here, some fraudulent communication is sent to the user, maybe on an email. The user believes it as if it is coming from a reputed source. He/She ends up clicking a link or filling out a form with information. With such an attack, critical financial information like login, password, and credit card details is gone or it can be used to install malware into your system.

Injection attacks, as the name suggests, try to inject something into the system to gain control. A popular example is the SQL injection attack. As you know, all the valuable customer data is stored in the databases, getting access to it would be fascinating for a hacker.

Beyond these, there are many like Denial of Service attacks, Viruses, Worms, malware, brute-force, and ransomware, and so on. And they would keep on increasing, however, security engineers are trained to look at such attacks and take appropriate measures to secure the systems. What they do is Ethical hacking. And if you are trying to become one, look for Ethical Hacking Course Online.

Need of Ethical Hacking

A BSE-listed company that recently held its board meeting in South Mumbai roped in investigators to sweep the conference room for bugs ahead of their meeting. And Voila! Investigators found identical bugs—video and audio malware – embedded deep inside two cell phones and a tablet of three different executives…
‘India Inc more vulnerable due to pandemic; cyber-attacks jumped 10X in the last two years ‘— Economics Times

This is the recent news from Economic Times. As work from home culture spreads and our life becomes more and more digital, these treats are bound to increase. Invent a new technology for doing something good and you will find some people who would use it for destruction. Till this battle between good and evil continues, the war-front will need more learned soldiers in the form of security engineers.

Welcome to such a challenging and rewarding career. You can start learning on your own or join the Ethical Hacking course in Pune at Texceed Technologies and fast-forward your career.