We humans are highly tech savvy in today's times, with the extensive use of the internet and modern technologies, there is a massive challenge in protecting all our digital data, such as net banking information, account credentials, and medical reports to name a few.
Ram runs a trading company. He does online training with the money his customers invest, everything was going well and Ram's business was booming, until a hacker decided to hack the company's servers. The hackers stole the credentials of various trading accounts. He asked for a lump sum ransom in exchange for the stolen credentials. Ram took the hackers' words lightly and didn't pay the hacker. As a result, the hacker withdrew money from various customers' accounts, and Ram was liable to pay back the customers. Ram lost a lot of money and also the trust of his customers. After this incident, Ram gave a lot of thought as to what could have gone wrong with the security infrastructure in his company. He wished there was someone from his company who could have run a test attack to see how vulnerable systems were before the hacker penetrated into the network. This was when he realized he needed an employee who thinks like a hacker and identifies the vulnerabilities in his network before an outsider does.
First and foremost, you need to have a good knowledge of operating environments such as Windows, Linux, Unix and Macintosh, you must have reasonably good knowledge of programming languages such as HTML, PHP, Python, SQL, and JavaScript.
Have you heard about the deadly wanna cry ransomware attack. The attack happened in May 2017 in Asia, and then it spread across the world. Within a day, more than 230,000 computers were infected across 150 countries.
The wanna cry crypto worm encrypted the data and lock the users out of their systems. For decryption of the data, the users were asked for a ransom of 300 to $600 in Bitcoin, the users who use the unsupported version of Microsoft Windows, and those who hadn't installed the security update of April 2017. were targeted in this attack.
The wanna cry attack took a toll on every sector, the top tier organizations like Hitachi, Nissan, and FedEx had to put their businesses on hold as their systems were affected too.
Now, this is what you call a cyber attack. To prevent such attacks, cybersecurity is implemented. We can define cybersecurity as the practice of protecting networks, programs, computer systems and their components from unauthorized digital attacks.
These illegal attacks are often referred to as hacking, hacking refers to exploiting weaknesses in a computer network to obtain unauthorized access to information. A hacker is a person who tries to hack into computer systems. This is a misconception that hacking is always wrong. There are hackers who work with different motives.
Let's have a look at three different types of hackers. Black Hat hackers are individuals who illegally hack into a system for monetary gain.
On the contrary, we have white hat hackers who exploit the vulnerabilities in a system by hacking into it with permission in order to defend the organization. This form of hacking is absolutely legal and ethical. Hence they are also often referred to as ethical hackers.
In addition to these hackers, we also have the grey hat hackers. As the name suggests, the colored gray is a blend of both white and black. These hackers discover vulnerabilities in a system and report it to the system's owner, which is a good act, but they do this without seeking the owner's approval. Sometimes grey hat hackers also asked for money in return for the spotted vulnerabilities.
Now that you have seen the different types of hackers, let's understand more about the hacking that is legal and valid, ethical hacking through an interesting story.
To do this job. He hired an ethical hacker Jagdish, Jagdish was a skilled professional who worked precisely like a hacker. In no time, he spotted several vulnerabilities in Ram's organization and closed all the loopholes. Hiring an ethical hacker helped Ram protect his customers from further attacks in the future.
This in turn, increased the company's productivity and guarded the company's reputation. So now you know hacking is not always bad. Jagdish, in this scenario, exposes the vulnerabilities in the existing network and such hacking is known as ethical hacking.
Ethical Hacking is distributed into six different phases.
Let us look at these phases step by step with respect to Jagdish, our ethical hacker will act before launching an attack. The first step Jagdish takes is to gather all the necessary information about the organization system that he intends to attack. This step is called reconnaissance. He uses tools like Nmap and H ping for this purpose. Jagdish then tries to spot the vulnerabilities, if any, in the target system using tools like in Nmap and expos, this is the scanning phase. Now that he has located the vulnerabilities he then tries to exploit them. This step is known as gaining access After Jagdish makes his way through the organization's networks, he tries to maintain his access for future attacks by installing backdoors in the target system.
The meta sploit tool helps him with this. This phase is called maintaining access. Jagdish is a brilliant hacker. Hence, he tries his best not to leave any evidence of his attack.
This is the fifth phase clearing tracks, we now have the last phase that is reporting.
In this phase, Jagdish documents a summary of his entire attack, the vulnerabilities he spotted, the tools he used and the success rate of the attack.
Looking into the report, Ram is now able to take a call and see how to protect his organization from any external cyber attacks. Don't you all think Jagdish is an asset to any organization.
If you want to become an ethical hacker like Jagdish, then there are a few skills that you need to acquire.
Networking is the base of ethical hacking, hence, you should be good at it. ethical hackers should be well aware of security laws so that they don't misuse their skills.
Finally, you must have a global certification on ethical hacking to successfully bag a position as an ethical hacker like Jagdish.
The endless growth of technologies in this area is directly proportional to the number of cyber crimes. Cyber crimes are estimated to cost $6 trillion in 2021.
Hence, to tackle these cyber crimes organizations are continuously on the lookout for cybersecurity professionals.
The average annual salary of a Certified Ethical Hacker is $91,000 in the US and approximately rupees seven lakhs in India.
So what are you waiting for? Get certified and become an ethical hacker like Jagdish and put an end to the cyber attacks in the world.
We hope you found this informative and helpful.
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HACKING