Before knowing about the good, ethical hacker, let us first know what is an ethical hacker. An ethical hacker is a person who has been hired by some company based on his degree and his skills. An ethical hacker is also called a white-hat hacker and is certified by some governing body.
A good ethical hacker is the one which sticks to the rules made by the community or the rules that he made himself for him.
An ethical hacker is also called a penetration tester, before testing any vulnerability or bug an ethical hacker first takes permission from the owner.
For Example: If you are a hacker then, you are bounded by community rules. You are like a part of society in which behavior and discipline matter a lot. If a company, for example, Facebook hires you.
And you need to test the website then, you will have to first ask for permission from higher authorities of Facebook and if they permit you then only you will proceed forward to find vulnerability or bug on the website.
An ethical hacker after finding a bug or vulnerability in the website or application immediately reports to the higher staff while if he does not report or uses the bug to gain some profit. Then, it is classified as a non-ethical practice.
What Do we Have For You
- Difference Between hacker and ethical hacker
- Skills Required For Ethical Hackers
- Practical Knowledge
- Top Companies Hiring CyberSecurity Experts
- Conclusion
- FAQ
Difference Between hacker and ethical hacker
| Hacker | Ethical Hacker |
| Hacker comes under the category of illegal practicing. In this Hacking, there are two types of hacking practices I.e Black Hat hacking and Gray hat hacking | Ethical Hacker is also known as a legal hacker or white-hat hacker or a cybersecurity expert. |
| Hacker uses their skills to exploit the data and use them for their profits | Ethical Hackers uses their skills to protect the data from being stolen and maintains the security of the data platform |
| Hackers have deep knowledge of exploiting tools and good hands-on in programming languages and they use scripts available around the web to hack into systems. | Ethical hackers use their programming languages and tools to secure the systems. They create their scripts. |
| Some Hackers are: Richard Pryce and Matthew Bevan | Some Ethical Hackers are: Charlie Miller and Greg Hoglund |
Skills Required For Ethical Hackers
An ethical hacker must be a computer system expert and must have very strong programming skills. Like sometimes a system has encountered a vulnerability and it is written in C programming language.
So, if the hacker Encounter’s this vulnerability in the system an ethical hacker needs to fix it using the programming language but, the ethical hacker will fail if he is not able to fix the vulnerability so that is why an ethical hacker needs to know programming languages.
An ethical hacker is also like a hacker so an ethical hacker needs to know how to create scripts and also an ethical hacker needs to keep learning new skills. There is no limit of knowledge every day there are new exploits that are being created.
All the exploits, malware, and viruses that are created regularly are based on algorithms. One of the best examples of a Virus that has a strong algorithm is the Ransomware virus.
Social Engineering
An ethical hacker must be good at social engineering. Social Engineering is away from which a hacker convinces the victim to install his virus webpage, malicious apk, or forces him to enter the personal credentials.
Social Engineering is done in various ways but the main source to proceed towards social engineering is information gathering.
Information gathering is the process from which a hacker collects numerous information about victims. It can be started by visiting the victim’s Facebook page. Nowadays most of the information is grabbed from Facebook itself.
After this step, a hacker uses a Facebook information fathering tool to know your email and phone number. After a hacker gets your email the hacker has now a 50-50% probability that will he go for a Gmail hack or will he use it to do a phishing attack.
Most of the hackers firstly go with the option Phishing attack because, in this, the user himself enters his secret password and other details. After getting a password now the hacker can access your device also by sending you malicious links, PDFs, messages, Images.
Now there is even a way to hide a payload in image and video. Normally, no one doubts if an image is sent to them they generally download it and check what’s there in the image.
After opening the image hacker successfully gets the access of victims device and now, the hacker can control all his device connected to the wifi. Hacking is similar to the communicable disease ( Which spreads from coming in contact).
Once another user connects to the hacked device the hacker will try to get access to that device also.
Computer Networking
An ethical hacker must be good at computer Networking.
A network is a group of two or more devices connected to the sharing of data and resources. A network contains several different computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices connected by a wireless and physical connection like server and router.
For example: Suppose the client or device connected to the network through Wi-Fi or Ethernet. If the client opens the browser and types www. Wikipedia .com, then your computer will send a request to the router for asking www. Wikkipedia .com.
The router will surf on the internet and request www. Wikkipedia .com . The router will receive www. Wikkipedia .com and forward that response to the computer network. Now the client can see www. Wikkipedia .com on the browser as a result.
In networking, devices on the same network ( Like Connected on the same Wifi router or LAN )communicate with each other using a group of packets. If you send an image, video surfs a website, log in a website, chatting, sending messages, sending an email, all the data is sent in the form of packets.
In networking, devices ensure that these packets go in the right direction means if you are sending the chat message then it should reach its destination.
If your message fails to reach the destination or someone in the middle receives your messages and keeps an eye on you then, your packets are being captured using the mac address.
Each packet has the source mac and destination mac, and the packets flow from the source mac to the destination mac.
Practical Knowledge
A hacker and a cybersecurity expert both need a deep knowledge of all the factors of security like breaching, password cracking, Social engineering, Phone book hacking, and many more.
Most of the hackers now use kali Linux and parrot as hacking systems. Like in smartphones we install our applications from play store we open play store, search for our application name and install it. Github is similar to the play store.
Github is the most popular website, it includes several scripts. It is free and can be used by anyone, it is most popularly known for hacking purpose.
We need to visit the GitHub, search for our required hacking tool and then, search for your desired hacking script and then install in our system for that, we have to first see that our Github package is updated.
Like we used to check our play store before updating apps our play store should be updated first like that only our GitHub should be updated before installing new hacking packages.
Now Follow the process git clone < URL of the package that you want to install (copy it from Github repository) >.
From this, you will be able to install multiple scripts and perform hacking attacks.
Top Companies Hiring CyberSecurity Experts
Apple: Apple is hiring security experts so that their product can meet the demand of customers.
Cisco: Cisco is hiring security researcher experts.
Intel: Is hiring key researcher and programmers
Conclusion
An ethical hacker can learn various programming languages by taking tutorials or taking coachings, Learn about networking, hardware, Learn how to hack but Social Engineering and Key chain hacking is the most important part that is developed by practicing.
Once you gain mastery in Social engineering, you can hack anyone even without any hacking tools.
That’s all for this article guys. Hope we meet in another article. Thank You for reading.
FAQ
Yes, They are paid a really good amount. According to Payscale, The Average salary of an Ethical hacker in INDIA is 5.0 Lakhs. It varies from 3.5 Lakhs to 80 Lakhs a year.
Social engineering, Without this no system is exploitable.
Yes, the Government hires Ethical hackers for Security and it is expected that opportunities will grow over 77 thousand for Ethical hackers in INDIA.
Ankit Fadia
ICA, Indian Cyber Army
