Why Should We Consider Ethical Hacking Seriously?

While talking about hacking what do we tend to imagine? A silhouetted figure in hoodie typing something in the computer, a black screen, innumerable codes, a dark indoor, right? In movies, it just takes a few seconds to breach into a system and get all the data. But, in reality, it takes lots of sweat and blood to carry out the procedure called 'Hacking'.

It takes immense hard work, skills, knowledge, and passion to become a professional Ethical Hacker. Now, the question arrives, how can interfering into someone else's database be ethical? Though sounds like an oxymoron, it is true that the world needs white hat hackers now more than any time before. Business houses, law enforcement cells, Government houses are in need of skilled professional ethical hackers.

With the advancement of technology, like IT outsourcing, cloud computing, virtualization; we are exposed to various security threats every day. In that case, the networking experts are hired to protect database of a particular organization from potential harmful exploiters. Data exploitation can lead to greater damage to reputation and financial loss for any company. Now ethical hacking is one of the most popular security practices performed on regular basis.

Cyber crimes have increased massively in the last few years. Ransomware like WannaCry, Petya is making news every day with their other variants and it will not be an exaggeration to say that they are here to stay increasing their muscle power to cause more harm. Phishing schemes, malware, cyber espionage, IP spoofing etc are prevalent now. In order to safeguard data, companies need to adopt the proactive stance.

With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud comes baggage of security threats. Now, when business organizations are using cloud services like Google Drive, Microsoft Azure or Dropbox they are actually storing sensitive data on a third-party tool which may or may not work in their best interest. Using third-party file sharing services actually allows the data taken outside of the company's IT environment. This often leads to several security threats including losing control over sensitive data, snooping, key management, data leakage etc.

Almost every one of us is active on various social networking sites. We actively share our whereabouts, interests, address, phone numbers, date of birth there and with the information, it is easy for cyber criminals to figure out the victim's identity or steal their passwords. A study reveals, around 60,000 Facebook profiles get compromised every day. Social media users are likely to click on anonymous links shared by friends or someone they trust. This is an old method of exploiting victim's computer. Creating fake Facebook 'like' buttons to webpages is also a very popular method of cyber crimes.

The definition of network forensics and ethical hackers has been evolved over the time. Many organizations are yet to realize that the cost to protect the company database is much less than dealing with a grave cyber attack to recover all data. Prevention is always better than cure. Network forensics and ethical hackers are hired in IT sectors to continuously monitor and identify potential vulnerabilities and take action according to that.

Organizations must incorporate advanced layered defense, multiple threat detection engines to detect and diminish threat at the very first stage. Do not fall into the trap of fancier threat tactics. It is time to take serious action to defeat cyber criminals in their own game.