What is Ethical Hacking: All You Need to Know!

India ranks as the top location across the globe for ethical hackers, with such “white-hat” Indian workers earning $2.3 million (Source: BBC News), by recognizing, reporting, and resolving security vulnerabilities. This growing prevalence of ethical hacking job roles calls for more awareness of this niche, and you can leverage this blog to get such awareness on what it is exactly, how it works, why it is so relevant, the benefits of ethical hacking, and its share of challenges. 

What Is Ethical Hacking & What Are The Types?

Ethical hacking is the authorized attempt to fetch unauthorized access to a particular computing system, application, or data, via positive utilization of strategies and actions taken by other malicious hackers. This practice empowers governmental bodies and organizations to identify potential security risks that can be mitigated before any venomous hacker gets the opportunity to exploit them. Ethical hacking involves identifying systems and information that hackers want to access the most, what the attacker can do with such systems or information, the number of people who noticed the attempted hack, and what’s the ideal way to fix the security issue. 

There are various types of ethical hacking – Web Application Hacking, Network Hacking, Wireless Network Hacking, System Hacking, Physical Hacking, IoT Hacking, Ethical Hacking of Mobile Platforms, Cloud Security Testing, and Reverse Engineering. 

How Do Ethical Hacking Work? 

Although ethical hacking is of different types, the main methodology remains the same across all types and here it follows. 

1. Reconnaissance: The method of collecting information about the target system, application, network, or data, and identifying potential risks therein. 

2. Scanning: This is the stage where ethical hackers use diverse tools to actively scan and detect vulnerabilities in the targeted system, network, or app. 

3. Gaining Access: This step includes exploiting the identified weaknesses to derive access to the system or network. 

4. Maintaining Access: If the ethical hacker stands successful in getting access, they may retain this access to examine the extent of the identified potential damage. 

5. Covering Tracks: This, is the final step, where the ethical hackers make sure that their activities within the system are not anyhow detectable by the system administrator(s).   

Also Read: Expert Opinions on Cybersecurity 

Some of the common vulnerabilities detected through this process of ethical hacking are – 

1. Security misconfigurations.

2. Injection attacks. 

3. Phishing threats. 

4. Broken authentication and authorization.

5. Sensitive data exposure. 

6. Use of components that are known to have vulnerabilities.

7. Vulnerabilities in business logic. 

8. Chains of Vulnerability. 

Benefits of Ethical Hacking

Some of the significant benefits of ethical hacking are as follows. 

1. Ethical hacking helps organization bodies discover and resolve security flaws in their system before a venomous hacker can get to it. 

2. It enables organizations to proactively approach risk management by revealing and mitigating potential threats way ahead of them to turn a critical concern. 

3. With the prioritization of security through ethical hacking, organizations can establish trust among their customers and audiences, thereby enhancing their reputation. 

4. As ethical hacking provides meaningful insights into vectors of potential attacks, organizations can train their stakeholders and raise awareness of the security risks that they might be exposed to. 

5. By availing of ethical hacking insights, organizations can also improve and improvize their incident response plans via replication of attacks and testing the efficacy of their defences. 

6. Ethical hacking empowers organizations with more room for innovation by ensuring that the new and upcoming products or services remain confidential and secure, further enabling a confident initiative launch. 

7. Furthermore, it allows organizations to reflect their commitment towards security and data protection compliance, subsequently meeting the industry standards.     

Also Read: The Best Security Practices on Laptops

Challenges of Ethical Hacking 

Despite the ample benefits ethical hacking holds for enhanced digital security, there are challenges, too! Here are some of the most crucial challenges of ethical hacking that need to be addressed to derive its complete effectiveness.

1. Ethical hacking can sometimes cause system interruption and while numerous ethical hackers and ethical hacking services exist in the market today, the functioning quality is often inconsistent. 

2. Due to limited experience, many ethical hackers tend to heavily rely on automated tools, which is not supposed to be the case, and thereafter fail to secure the significant value of the ethical hacking endeavour. 

3. The most prominent of all cyber attacks, the social engineering attacks, i.e., the use of psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes, are difficult to detect even via ethical hacking. 

4. Due to variations in legal compliances across nations, ethical hacking, which is considered the “right thing to do”, encounters legal heat. Besides, as technological advancements are happening every day, many legal systems fail to keep up with them, causing gaps in legislation and enforcement concerning the use of ethical hacking. 

5. In the case of many cyberattacks, ethical hackers get a limited time to identify and fix security issues while the process of ethical hacking involves various technological complexities. 

In a nutshell, with merits and demerits, ethical hacking is a high-demand job field meant to combat the ever-evolving cyber threats and got cemented as the most salient component of cybersecurity. Further, the increasing digitalization across the globe alongside the advent of new and upcoming technologies would only pave for its increased need.