Write about ethical hacking in about 300 words.
Answers
Ethical hacking, in my opinion, is just as much as an oxymoron as ‘constructive criticism’. Before I go on to show that ‘ethical hacking’ is but an oxymoron only in the literal sense, it is essential for one to understand the words ’ethical’ and ‘hacking’ - origin, meaning and the misconception. ‘Ethical’ can be defined as ‘working with high professional morals and principles’. The original hacker was a person who liked to tinker with software and hardware alike, enjoying and exploring the way the things work. They would tweak their subject to perform faster, better or differently than it initially did. There was nothing negative about being a hacker, until the word was repeatedly misused by the media, synonymising ‘crackers’ with…show more content…
No mischievous objectives are to be perused. The misuse of the system and information provided to a hacker is strictly prohibited. Secondly, an ethical hacker is to, at all times, respect his employer’s/subject’s privacy. The information one gathers is to treated with utmost respect. While fool proofing the system, the hacker will come across sensitive data such as passwords, personal pictures and other valuable documents. These are, under all circumstances, to be kept private. An effective way to ward off the temptation of snooping around is to keep other people, one’s employers, involved in the penetration testing process. Third, and last of the basic rules, is to not crash the system in question. This can easily be avoided by planning properly, before jumping into the process and working plainly on instinct. This mainly happens when the white hat does not read the system documentation properly or does not understand the working and power of the tools he is using. An appropriate example of a an ethical hacker, who lives up to his designation, is the 24 year old Ankit Fadia. Even at this young age, Fadia boast to have written 14 international best-selling books on topics related to Computer Security, which have been appreciated by professionals and industrialist all over the world. Faida is considered by many to be the truest form of a white hat. He shows us the true potential and nature of a white hat, a picture very few of us can imagine.
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