Businesses and government agencies need ethical hackers to combat the increasing threat to IT security. Many experts, companies, and government agencies are increasingly realizing that shutting down your doors does not suffice to protect a system.
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What is Ethical Hacking? The Advantages of Ethical HackingTypes and Phases of Ethical Hacking
As more companies seek to enter the digital world, it is becoming more important to protect data from hackers and other cyber-attacks. These attacks can have devastating consequences for organizations, so they are looking at preventative measures. One of these is ethical hacking.
What is ethical hacking?
Ethical hacking identifies vulnerabilities and addresses them promptly to prevent them from getting worse. Hacking is done using permission. This distinguishes ethical hacking from other hacking techniques.
Ethical hacking refers to the analysis of an organization’s security strategy by a team known as “White Hat hackers or Red Team experts.” They have two main goals: to identify the vulnerability and provide a performance measurement system that shows the risk. To combat cybercrime, ethical hackers are employed by banks and public companies.
The Benefits of Ethical Hacking
The main benefit of ethical hacking is to stop illegal adversaries from stealing or misusing data.
So that vulnerabilities can be addressed, it is important to identify weaknesses from the attacker’s point of view.
Secure your network to prevent security breaches
Ensure the security and integrity of your services and data to increase shareholder and consumer trust
Assisting with network protection through real-world evaluations
Types of ethical hacking
Every organization, website, equipment, and network can be hacked. To understand how hacking might occur and its impact, ethical hackers need to think like malicious hackers. These are some of the most common types of ethical hacking:
Phases of ethical hacking
Organizations hire ethical hackers to recreate a cyberattack on their networks and systems. This attack is complex and requires multiple phases. It requires an enormous amount of expertise for ethical hackers to identify all vulnerabilities and properly leverage them.
This hypothetical attack is intended to highlight any weak areas within the enterprise and attempt their remediation. These are the five phases of ethical hacking:
1. Reconnaissance/Footprinting Reconnaissance is the first phase of ethical hacking, also known as the footprinting and information gathering phase. This is the first phase in which white hat hackers gather as many details as possible and implement security measures to the targeted system or network. White hat hackers typically gather information about three groups: host, network, and people. There are two main types of footprinting.
Active footprinting: Talk directly with the target to get information.
Passive footprinting: Obtaining information about the target without having direct access. Hackers exploit social media, websites and other public resources.
2. Scanning This is the second phase of an ethical hacker’s method. This involves applying all the knowledge gained during the reconnaissance phase to the target area to search for vulnerabilities. Hackers are looking for user accounts, credentials, IP addresses, and other data. There are three types:
Port scanning: This stage scans the target for data such open ports, live system, and other services that are active on the host.
Vulnerability scanning is a scanning technique that identifies the vulnerabilities of a target.