Ethical Hacking

What is ethical hacking?

A white hat is an ethical computer hacker, or a computer security expert, who specializes in penetration testing and other testing methodologies that ensure the security of an organization’s information systems. It’s among the most exciting IT jobs any person can be involved in. You are literally getting paid to keep up with the latest technology and get to break into computers without the threat of being arrested. Now, you can find Ethical Hackers working with some of the largest companies across industries like government, energy, financial and much more.

Hacking experts follow four key protocol concepts:

1. Stay legal: Obtain proper approval before accessing and performing a security assessment.
2. Define the scope: Determine the scope of the assessment so that the ethical hacker’s work remains legal and within the organization’s approved boundaries.
3. Report vulnerabilities: Notify the organization of all vulnerabilities discovered during the assessment. Provide remediation advice for resolving these vulnerabilities.
4. Respect data sensitivity: Depending on the data sensitivity, ethical hackers may have to agree to a non-disclosure agreement, in addition to other terms and conditions required by the assessed organization.
5. Ethical hackers use their knowledge to secure and improve the technology of organizations. They provide an essential service to these organizations by looking for vulnerabilities that can lead to a security breach.
6. An ethical hacker reports the identified vulnerabilities to the organization. Additionally, they provide remediation advice. In many cases, with the organization’s consent, the ethical hacker performs a re-test to ensure the vulnerabilities are fully resolved.

Ethical hackers use their knowledge to secure and improve the technology of organizations. They provide an essential service to these organizations by looking for vulnerabilities that can lead to a security breach. An ethical hacker reports the identified vulnerabilities to the organization. Additionally, they provide remediation advice. In many cases, with the organization’s consent, the ethical hacker performs a re-test to ensure the vulnerabilities are fully resolved. Ethical hackers use a similar tools, tricks, and techniques that malicious hackers used, however with the permission of the licensed person. the aim of Ethical hacking is to boost the safety and to defend the systems from attacks by malicious users.

Ethical hackers use exploits against the vulnerabilities to prove how a malicious attacker could exploit it. Some of the most common vulnerabilities discovered by ethical hackers include:

• Injection attacks
• Broken authentication
• Security misconfigurations
• Use of components with known vulnerabilities
• Sensitive data exposure

After the testing period, ethical hackers prepare a detailed report. This documentation includes steps to compromise the discovered vulnerabilities and steps to patch or mitigate them.

There are some limitations of ethical hacking

• Limited scope. Ethical hackers cannot progress beyond a defined scope to make an attack successful. However, it’s not unreasonable to discuss out of scope attack potential with the organization.
• Resource constraints. Malicious hackers don’t have time constraints that ethical hackers often face. Computing power and budget are additional constraints of ethical hackers.
• Restricted methods. Some organizations ask experts to avoid test cases that lead the servers to crash (e.g., Denial of Service (DoS) attacks).

Cyber security

Cyber Security is that the apply of defensive computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic devices, networks, information from malicious attacks. Malicious attacks area unit done by unethical hackers. an efficient cyber security, a company must coordinate its efforts throughout its entire data system.

Social engineering, Ransomware, DDoS attacks, Third party package and Cloud computing vulnerabilities are the Biggest Cyber security threats

CIA Triad

The CIA triad is a model that shows the three main goals needed to achieve information security. Confidentiality, integrity and availability are the concepts most basic to information security. These concepts in the CIA triad must always be part of the core objectives of information security efforts.

Confidentiality is the protection of information from unauthorized access. The CIA triad goal of integrity is the condition where information is kept accurate and consistent unless authorized changes are made. Availability is the situation where information is available when and where it is rightly needed.

Access control and its services

Access control is a security technique that regulates who or what can view or use resources in a computing environment. It is a fundamental concept in security that minimizes risk to the business or organization.

There are two types of access control: physical and logical. Physical access control limits access to campuses, buildings, rooms and physical IT assets. Logical access control limits connections to computer networks, system files and data.

Role of machine learning in security

Machine learning has become a significant technology for cybersecurity. Machine learning preemptively stamps out cyber threats and bolsters security infrastructure through pattern detection, period of time cyber crime mapping and thorough penetration testing.

Computer Security threats

A computer system threat is anything that leads to loss or corruption of data or physical damage to the hardware and/or infrastructure. Knowing how to identify computer security threats is the first step in protecting computer systems. The following list is the common types of non-physical threats;

• Virus
• Trojans
• Worms
• Spyware
• Key loggers
• Adware
• Denial of Service Attacks
• Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
• Unauthorized access to computer systems resources such as data
• Phishing

To protect computer systems from the above-mentioned threats, an organization must have logical security measures in place. The following list shows some of the possible measures that can be taken to protect cyber security threats

To protect against viruses, Trojans, worms, etc. an organization can use anti-virus software. In additional to the anti-virus software, an organization can also have control measures on the usage of external storage devices and visiting the website that is most likely to download unauthorized programs onto the user’s computer.

Unauthorized access to computer system resources can be prevented by the use of authentication methods. The authentication methods can be, in the form of user ids and strong passwords, smart cards or biometric, etc.

Intrusion-detection/prevention systems can be used to protect against denial of service attacks. There are other measures too that can be put in place to avoid denial of service attacks.