Ethical hacking

Ethical hacking

Ethical hacking involves the learning of techniques and tactics used by hackers to protect against cybercrime (Infosec, 2018). People who perform ethical hacking are usually trained hackers and certified ones to provide their services legally, which differentiates them from other illegal hackers who attack systems for their gain. Both legal and unlawful hackers are experts in this field, and so it is easy for ethical hackers to stop attacks by illegal hackers. In recent years, ethical hacking has been employed by many companies who pay ethical hackers to hack their systems to expose security vulnerabilities.

Cyberattacks have been ranked as among the first global threats because when attacks occur, they can have devastating effects for businesses and organizations. Hackers usually maximize on exploiting only one vulnerability that gives way to the systems. In contrast, ethical hackers are trained to look at different weaknesses and trying to correct them before any damage occurs (Lu, 2015). There are many benefits of businesses employing ethical hackers to help fight against cybersecurity. Ethical hackers can help businesses to find vulnerabilities in their data systems before hackers realize them.

This will cause the business to protect their data well and mitigate the risk of data loss by hackers. To reveal any vulnerabilities in an organization, these hackers usually place bug bounties on these systems and see if they can get past the system security. When an attack occurs, the tactics learned by the ethical hackers can be put in play to model the breach and get the business back on its feet within the shortest time. By the use of ethical hacking, it is easy to find the weak links in the in information security and therefore secure them accordingly before they are taken advantage of by the hackers (Wang, & Yang, 2017).

References

Infosec, (2018). The Benefits of Learning Ethical Hacking. Retrieved from         https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/the-benefits-of-learning-ethical-hacking/

Lu D. (2015). When Ethical Hacking Can’t Compete. Retrieved from             https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/white-hat-ethical-hacking-       cybersecurity/419355/

Wang, Y., & Yang, J. (2017, March). Ethical hacking and network defense: choose your best   network vulnerability scanning tool. In 2017 31st International Conference on Advanced        Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA) (pp. 110-113). IEEE.   Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7929663