Ethical Hacking
As society is becoming more and more reliable on technology in their everyday lives, there are hundreds of threats that exploit these users. In order to find the weak link in a company would hire a ethical hacker. They discover the weak link that can open the gate to allow unauthorized access to a network or have downloaded certain malware unknowingly that could cause harm to a single computer. Ethical hackers perform penetration testing that mimic the strategies and actions of a hacker to evaluate the hackability of an organization’s computer systems, networks or web applications (Yasar). There are three types of penetration testing: White Box Testing, Black Box Testing and Gray Box Testing. White box is where the company gives all the details about a network to the ethical hacker while black box is the company gives no information at all. The Gray box is a hybrid between the two testing styles where the company gives little information to the ethical hacker.
Most ethical hackers were at some point the offender. They have a lot of good information to offer to a criminologist researcher when they are trying to ask the question, why do hackers do what they do? Hacking can be overwhelming to learn, especially all the different coding languages they must learn and how to pick out bugs inside the code. Most hackers that spend these endless hours of research have a massive motivation. They must spend countless hours surveying a particular network to discover the weakness. These cyberattacks are largely political and they hack to make a point to the world. To discover these zero-day exploits, there has been numerous times where companies had called upon all the hackers in the world and challenged them for a prize money if they can penetrate their network. This will inspire script kiddies to improve their skill and get recognized for the hack. Most of the weaknesses in an office network are the employees themselves.
The most common technique that cybercriminals use to exploit company employees to give away certain information is called Social Engineering. Social engineering is a tool that is used mostly through emails to fool victims into given away their credentials. Ethical hackers explore the human centered incidents and dive deep into why computer users fall for phishing attacks. Prior to a social engineering attack, the cybercriminal gathers information from official websites of the target organization, advertisement, blogs, and forums (geekforgeek). The more information that the malicious user gathers the more believable they become. Without the proper training from information technology experts, employees can easily fall victim. Ethical hackers are aware of this, and it is one of the ways an ethical hacker can gather authentication information to gain access to a network. A good way to visualize the weaknesses in an office network is to perform experiments.
A way for an ethical hacker to present security flaws to a company manager they need to perform experiments to know exactly where the weak link is. A good way to experiment with the computer users is to utilize a classical experiment approach. The ethical hacker can send out an email that is specifically designed to look legit as possible to a randomly selected group of people. These emails will be tailored to represent spear phishing. The emails will have personal information that seem to be specifically targeted to the selected user by utilizing the first name or other personal information. The second set of emails to another random group of computer users will be broader. This will not be tailored personally but will resemble subscription problems or anti-virus software companies telling them there is a virus on their computer. After the first phishing attack the system administrator can give training and inform the company how they did on the randomized test. Then after the training there can be another penetrating test to see how affective the training was.
Ethical hacking is very important in cybersecurity. It keeps companies informed of their security weaknesses. Ethical hacking is used as a common and favored process to analyze the security systems and programs of an organization (edureka). With the rise of technology being more intertwined in an everyday office environment the need for ethical hackers is significantly increasing. They are important to office workers because they discover the vulnerability and keep the employees safe from potential fraud as well as educate them on good cyber hygiene.
Works Cited
Journalist, Edureka. edureka. 14 March 2023. Blog. 06 April 2023. <https://www.edureka.co/blog/importance-of-ethical-hacking/>.
Journalists, geeksforgeeks. geeksforgeeks. 12 March 2021. article. 6 April 2023. <https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/why-is-social-engineering-effective-ethical-hacking/>.
Yasar, Kinza. techtarget. November 2022. Web Page. 06 April 2023. <https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/penetration-testing>.