Ethical Hacking Concepts And Scope

Ethical Hacking Concepts and Scope

What is Ethical Hacking?

Ethical hacking and penetration testing are common terms, popular in information security environment for a long time. Increase in cyber crimes and hacking create a great challenge for security experts and analyst and regulations over the last decade. This war between hacker and security professional become more popular.

Fundamental Challenges to these security experts are of finding weaknesses and deficiencies in running and upcoming systems, applications, software and addressing them proactively. It is less costly to be investigate proactively before an attack instead to investigating after falling in to an attack, or while dealing with an attack. For security aspect, prevention and protection, organizations have their own penetration testing teams internally as well as contracted outside professional experts when and if they are needed depending upon the severity and scope of attack

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Why Ethical Hacking is Necessary

Rise in malicious activates, cyber crimes and appearance of different forms of advanced attacks requires to need of penetration tester who penetrate the security of system and networks to be determine, prepare and take precaution and remediation action against these aggressive attacks.

These aggressive and advanced attacks include: –

• Denial-of-Services Attacks
• Manipulation of data
• Identity Theft
• Vandalism
• Credit Card theft
• Piracy
• Theft of Services

Increase in these type of attacks, hacking cases and cyber attacks, because of increase of use of online transaction and online services in last decade. This become more attractive for hackers and attacker to tempt to steal information, financial information etc. Computer or Cyber crime law has slowed down prank activities only, whereas Real attacks and cyber crimes are raised. This focuses on the requirement of pen tester, short form of Penetration tester for search for vulnerabilities and flaw within a system before waiting for an attack.

If you want to beat the attacker and hacker, you want to be smart enough to think like them, act like them. As we know, hackers are skilled, with great knowledge of hardware and software and exploration capabilities. It ensures the need and importance of ethical hacking which allow the ethical hacker to counter the attack form malicious hackers by anticipating methods. Another major advantage and need of ethical hacking is to uncover the vulnerabilities in systems and security deployments to take action to secure them before they are used by hacker to breach security.

Scope and Limitations of Ethical Hacking

Ethical Hacking is an important and crucial component of risk assessment, auditing, counter frauds. Ethical hacking is widely used as penetration testing to identify the vulnerabilities, risk and highlight the holes in order to take remedial actions against attacks. However, there are also some limitation where ethical hacking is not enough, or just through ethical hacking, the issue could not resolve. An organization, before hiring an external pen tester, first know about what he is looking for. This should be well defined that why there is need an of external hacker to hack the system. This will not only help to focus the goals to achieve but also save the time, and testing dedicatedly to resolve the issues. Another limitation is the ethical hacker can also help to better understand the security system of an organization. It will be up to the organization to take actions recommended by the Pen tester and place required security over the system and network.

Phases of Ethical Hacking

Ethical Hacking is the combination of the following phases: –

1. Foot printing & Reconnaissance
2. Scanning
3. Enumeration
4. System Hacking
5. Escalation of Privileges
6. Covering Tracks

Skills of an Ethical Hacker

A skilled ethical hacker has a set of technical and non-technical skills

Technical Skills

1. Ethical Hacker has in-depth knowledge of almost all operating system, including all popular, widely used operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix & Macintosh.
2. These ethical hackers are skilled of networking, basic and detailed concepts, technologies and exploring capabilities of hardware and software.
3. Ethical hackers must have strong command over security areas, related issues, and technical domains.
4. They must have detailed knowledge of older, advanced, sophisticated attacks.

Non-Technical Skills

1. Learning ability
2. Problem solving skills
3. Communication skills
4. Committed to security policies
5. Awareness of laws, standards, and regulations.