When you hear the word hacking, it is hardly full of positive connotations is it? The whole concept sparks images of cybercriminals and malware, of data getting broken into, laptops needing replacing and lives being ruined. What you might not know is that there is the growing practice of ethical hacking. This is an incredibly important aspect of computer technology and staying on top of security.
What Is Ethical Hacking?
Using different remote learning sources, you can get certified in ethical hacking yourself. When you obtain a CEH certification, you will learn all about the different aspects of ethical hacking which will teach you that it is performed by security experts as a means to assess different pieces of technologies security. This work allows organizations to improve their security and understand what the flaws in different security systems might be. You can make a computer or software as secure as possible, but you aren’t going to know how effectively it works until you have someone try to overcome said security. When someone is able to ethically hack into your system, you can study how they did it and work out improvements you can make to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The Key Concepts of Ethical Hacking
There are a number of key concepts that constantly need to be kept in mind when people practice ethical hacking. These are:
- Keep it Legal: You can’t just hack into software and then reveal you were doing it for the right reasons. Everything needs to be carried out within the confines of the law, which means approval has to be obtained before ethical hacking can take place.
- The Scope Must Be Defined: You need to determine and define the scope of an assessment, again, this will ensure that the work done by the ethical hacker is legal and the organization consents to everything.
- All Vulnerabilities Need to Be Reported: Any vulnerabilities that are found following ethical hacking need to be reported to the organization. The whole point is to fix potential problems so findings cannot be kept secret from the business in question.
- Data Sensitivity Must Be Respected: This will change on a case-by-case basis but chances are, ethical hackers will have to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement which sets out the rules surrounding data sensitivity. This agreement will likely contain a number of other terms set out by the organization that need to be adhered to.
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Conclusion
There are a number of different practices carried out by tech companies in order to make sure that the software and hardware in place for different businesses is top of the line. One of these methods is by using ethical hacking. Ethical hacking is where somebody will try to hack into a company’s accounts but not to gain sensitive data, rather to report any of the issues that surround the companies tech. It means that problems can be reported and then subsequently can be fixed. In order for ethical hacking to be carried out there are a number of concepts that need to be kept in mind, as detailed above.