Computer hacking involves various nuances. What prompts a hacker is an intent, benign or malicious, to hack a particular application. “Ethical hacking”, a term coined by the cyber industry, describes the actions of hacking that are purely ethical means a hacker exploits a network with the permission of its owner. This distinction keeps Ethical hackers aka white hat hackers separated from black-hatted bad guys.
Why Use Ethical Hacking?
What can you expect to get when you pay to someone to hack into your application or website? Expose of security vulnerabilities! Being a part of the cyber world, you need to think like a criminal to prevent attacks. Ethical hackers use the same methods as their counterparts to test a security system, but they do it to report problems. The Federal government practices ethical hacking since the 1970s, and most companies employ white hat teams within their information security practice to attain the highest level of security. Other slang terms for ethical hackers are “sneakers,” “red teams”, and “tiger teams”. A variety of certification authorities train and certify your skills in implementing cybersecurity practices in an organization successfully.
Today, application security revolves around penetration testing. Companies perform “Pen tests” by artificially developing the scenarios of hacking and try to mimic what a bad hacker could achieve in reality. For manual application testing, cyber experts attempt to exploit the app and report the findings. From simple information-gathering exercises to outright attacks, different tests are performed which would cause damage if happened actually. Moreover, social engineering techniques have become an integral part of core ethical hacking, for example, tricking emailing staff for revealing passwords and other account details.
Free and Open Source Ethical Hacking Tools to Use:
A wide pool of ethical hacking tools is available to choose from according to challenges and requirements you have for cybersecurity. The tools mentioned below offer just a slice of the available offerings, but they are reliable and come for free.
Armitage
Being one of the most preferred penetration testing frameworks for networks and IT infrastructure, Armitage is designed for more user-friendly front-end version for the Metasploit framework.
NMap
Nmap or you can say Network Mapper is an open-sourced utility which works a security auditing tool. By finding a network services out, it hosts to develop a network map, which it further analyzes.
This tool is even featured as the go-to hacking tool in many movies and TV shows.
WireShark
Its offerings include network protocol capture and real-time analysis which make it a standard tool amongst others. Using this tool gives you a wider look into network traffic and zoom in on individual packets while providing naives a detailed intro to TCP/IP.
Faraday
This tool has transformed the way to perform pentesting. It has scored 6th rank on the top security tools list by ToolsWatch.org. It plays a major role in analysis, indexation, and distribution of the data.
International standards followed by ethical hackers
Being an ethical hacker, you are expected to follow industry trends to carry out penetration testing. An important trend is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. With a global set of recognised policies and procedures, this trend enhances the securities of credit, debit in addition to cash card transactions, and safeguards cardholders personal information.
Apart from having large teams of employees as ethical hackers, organizations own ethical hacking labs like Trustwave Holdings Inc., heading towards comprehensive cybersecurity which includes the tracking of vulnerabilities in ATMs, POS devices along with surveillance systems.
Hacking is a passion, but it must be ethical in all aspects. It’s a good career option, but only if you have good knowledge of advanced tools and techniques. Proceeding with an ethical hacking course will make you think of, work for, and make decisions for like a professional hacker.
