Role of Ethical Hacking in Cyber Security

In this technical era and the internet-driven world, hacking has become one of the biggest threats for business organizations and government agencies. Cyber-attack incidents are increasing at a disappointingly high rate and thus, it’s become an unarguable fact for the companies that the traditional network security measures are no longer potentially viable to prevent such malicious attacks.

As predicted under Moore’s Law, computer hardware is getting more cheap, capable, and faster. But, with these improvements have come complexity. This complexity leads to some unintended vulnerabilities, that get created most often due to lacking comprehensive knowledge of how to deal with the system configuration.

Therefore, Ethical Hacking came into the scenery to unveil the vulnerabilities and threats in the computer systems that can be a welcome-door for a cyber-attack.

Here in this blog, we’ll be discussing the role of ethical hacking in cyber-security for businesses and industries-

What is Ethical Hacking??

The term ‘hacking’ was originated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s to define the concept of securing and redeveloping mainframe systems.

Ethical hacking is a form of legal hacking that is used in defense in case of a cyber-attack. In some cases, terms such as ‘Penetration Testing’, ‘Red Teaming’, or ‘Intrusion Testing’ are also used to define ethical hacking.

“An ethical hacker is, however, an individual who is usually employed with an organization and who can be trusted to undertake an attempt to penetrate networks and/or computer systems using the same methods and techniques as a malicious hacker.”

Over the course of a decade, cyber or malicious attacks have become a matter of concern for the government as well as private organizations.

Whenever the term ‘Hacking’ is used, it carries the images of crooked techie guy breaking illegitimately into a computer system. However, the concept of White Hat Hackers is different as they retaliate against the attack caused by the ‘black hat’ practitioners. The white hat hackers demonstrate the impact of damage of a malicious security-breaching act upon the vulnerable systems and offer advice and protection from such dangers.

Services Under Ethical Hacking –

The ethical hacking model includes services like –

• Application Testing
• Local Network Testing
• Wireless Security
• Wire Dialing
• System Hardening

These services test and infiltrate the security levels in applications, networks, wireless networks, etc. and provide promising measures to ensure system stability and accessibility.

Need and Advantages of Ethical Hacking

Ethical hacking goes hand-in-hand with ‘Penetration Testing’ and most often are the same concepts. However, ethical hacking covers a great scope than just penetration testing.

An organization hires an ethical hacker to penetrate the online defenses of a computer network and find out the vulnerabilities it may present to an attacker and developing solutions to prevent data breaches the security of the company’s data. Ethical Hacking prevents data breaches and protects businesses from cyber terrorists.

Here are a few advantages of ethical hacking for businesses –

• Testing Security Measures
• Finding Vulnerable Areas
• Understanding the Techniques and Approach of Hacker
• Identification and preparation for a cyber-attack
• Security Awareness to a data or network breach

Cyber Security with White Hat Hackers

An ethical hacker looks into the server and network security of the organization and points out the vulnerabilities through with a black-hat hacker can attack. He is also permitted to penetrate into the target network.

The ethical or white-hat hacker plays an important role in network and data security and finds out the weak spots and can report about the concerned vulnerabilities so that the authorities can further proceed in the same lime.

The need for Ethical Hackers came into demand when networks and servers of organizations and government bodies were breached thoroughly. Here are the reasons that describe the need to hire an ethical hacker –

• To invent solutions that would safeguard the network and data from malicious attacks
• To determine which of the security measures are effective and which ones need upgradation, and which are not able to withstand an attack.
• To make decisions about how and where to improve data security.
• To create security awareness at all levels in an organization.
• To raise data and network security standards and make them impossible to breach.

Summary:

Once you know what ethics are, it will eventually lead you to understand the term ‘ethical hacking’ more profoundly. In this 21st century, banking, business, and government bodies are driven not by the choice but the necessity of having ethical hackers.

For very good and obvious reasons, ethical hacking has become a significant part of industries and organizations all across the globe.

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