Ethical Hacking Courses

Ethical hacking is the act of legally breaking into computer networks, mobile devices, or other systems to evaluate their security level, rather than with malicious or criminal intent. Although some sources argue that ethical hacking is a term that implies a broader category of activities, most associate it with penetration testing.

Ethical hackers, also known as “white hats”, are security experts who perform these assessments to test an organization’s defenses. They may use the same methods and tools used by malicious hackers, although with the intent of diagnosing and patching threats and vulnerabilities before malicious attackers can exploit them.

Ethical hackers may target cloud services, computer networks, mobile devices, and even use social engineering (such as emailing staff to ask for password details) in their penetration tests. Their activities frequently involve examining known defects in protocols and applications running on the system, reverse engineering, disk and memory forensics, and DoS attacks.

The purpose of ethical hacking is to improve the network or system’s security by fixing the vulnerabilities found during testing. Companies engage ethical hackers to identify such vulnerabilities in their systems, usually in an effort associated with preventing loss of data, preventing financial loss, or complying with security-related requirements.

Common vulnerabilities found in the process are injection attacks, broken authentication, security misconfigurations, use of components with known vulnerabilities, and sensitive data exposure. A re-test is typically performed to ensure the vulnerabilities are fully resolved.