What is an ethical hacker?

• In general, the hackers are associated with computer crimes, but there is an exception: the hackers ethical
• Some experts consider hackers ethics as one of the three STEM professions with the greatest projection

Sabotage, industrial espionage, extortion, data theft... these are some of the activities linked to hack or hacking. In short, a cybercriminal or hacker violates the security of a system for a malicious purpose.

But when the high level of knowledge or skills are put at the service of ethical activities, a new figure appears: the hacker ethicist or cyber expert. In this case, it will search for vulnerabilities or weaknesses in infrastructures or computer systems to guarantee your security and privacy. They are known as "white hats".

Some experts consider hackers ethics as one of the three STEM professions with projection.

hacker ethical or expert

To make it a hack Ethical, the cybersecurity expert has an explicit assignment from his client: to bypass the security of his own systems. When this consent or request previously existed, the hack is considered ethical.

The main function of hacker Ethical is to circumvent the analyzed system and test the effectiveness of its security. Any security breach, weakness or error diagnosed by this hacker they will be forwarded to your customer and owner of the system.

Other functions can be:

• Investigation of organizational systems and networks.
• Carrying out penetration tests.
• Identification and registration of failures and security breaches.
• Identification of areas that need high security.
• Rate security systems.
• Improvement reports.
• Penetration test reports.

Most frequent problems in cybersecurity

The most frequent cybersecurity problems that hackers ethics they face are:

• Injection attacks: these are information access attacks through code injection.
• Broken authentication, using unauthorized access and password breaches.
• Incorrect security configurations, which facilitate the access of criminals to the systems.
• Use of components with known vulnerabilities, from systems to applications that facilitate unauthorized access to computer systems.
• Exposure of sensitive data, a consequence of poor security.

current scenario

Currently, cyber threats and organized attacks that are taking place globally have highlighted the need for hackers ethical. In fact, they have become expert allies in large companies.

These computer security professionals analyze and test networks and systems, looking for flaws that need to be fixed and removing vulnerabilities.