What is Ethical Hacking? - BlueMark Academy

Hackers are popular topic known and voiced by almost everyone, but ethical hacker is a mystery to many. In this article, we’ll explain what happened and how it can be beneficial for your organization;

Ethical hacking (also known as penetration testing) is a term that covers intrusion practices that aim to discover all kinds of threats and important cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can be found and exploited by a malicious attacker. Such vulnerabilities can cost organizations valuable data, hard-earned images, and even billions of dollars. This is the reason why ethical hackers exist. Before malicious hackers, they try to find vulnerabilities and issues in an organization’s security system.

An ethical hacker seeks answers to the questions below to help security teams improve an organization’s security posture.

What types of vulnerabilities are there? How many of these can attackers see?

What is the most attractive piece of information or system for a hacker? Where do they want to access?

What can a hacker do with information from the organization?

How many people in the cyber security team noticed the ongoing attack? Could they stop it? How? When?

What’s the most appropriate way to fix this vulnerability?

Ethical hackers attack an organization and test security measures to answer the above questions.

Why is ethical hacking important?

No doubt, the most valuable asset in today’s business environment is information. Organizations of all types and sizes, from government agencies to private companies, deal with large amounts of sensitive and valuable data on a daily basis. As a result, often terrorist groups, hacker teams, cybercriminals, etc. They are targeted by.

Organizations of all sizes take a lot of security measures to keep them safe and protected, but simply locking your doors and closing your windows cannot guarantee your security. In today’s world, organizations need to take proactive measures and regularly update their security. Hackers are finding new ways to bypass firewalls, antivirus software and similar barriers every day, so your organization needs to keep up with that.

Ethical hackers offer a new approach to security. They do ‘penestration tests’ in your organization to test your security measures. In other words, they ‘hack’ your systems for you and provide you with insight and valuable information about your organization’s security status. As a result, you get the opportunity to see your organization from a hacker perspective, without facing real threats like sensitive data theft.

Once you know how hackers view and approach your organization, you can update your security measures accordingly. This way, you can ensure that the walls around your establishment are thick enough and sufficiently protective.

What are the types of ethical hacking?

Since almost any component of a system can be hacked and these ‘hacking’ performances require deep knowledge of that component, there are different types of ethical hacking practices. Below is a list of different ethical hacking practices.

Web application hacking
Social engineering
System hacking
Hacking wireless networks
Web server hacking