What is ethical hacking?
Ethical hacking is also known as white-hat hacking. It has the same tricks, techniques and tools that hackers use but the difference is that ethical hacking is legal.
Who is an ethical hacker?
Hacker finds the vulnerabilities in a system. Hacking is illegal and can lead to legal consequences if you are caught in the act. Ethical hacking is legal. Ethical hacker never damages the target system and never steal the information. People who hack into the system without any intention to harm the system are known as ethical hackers and this process is called ethical hacking.
Qualification to become an ethical hacker
Ethical hacking career depends on your current field of work if you are not in the IT field you should try shifting into one. Most of the job requires you to have a degree, well it is not impossible to directly become an ethical hacker. Most ethical hackers start their carrier as a support engineer by gaining certificates like CCNA and CISSP. After gaining the CEH certificate you should market yourself as an ethical hacker and you will get the opportunity for sure.
Role and Responsibilities of an ethical hacker
One of the most important skill to become an ethical hacker is networking skills. The certified ethical hacker (CEH) is offered by the international council of E-commerce consultants ie EC Council. It’s a must-have for IT professionals and certifies their competence in the five-phase: reconnaissance, enumeration, maintain access, gaining access and covering tracks.
CEH certified holder provide knowledge and skill on hacking practices in areas such as scanning networks, system hacking, worms and viruses, denial of service attacks, session hijacking, wireless network and web applications, cryptography, evading IDS, honey-pots, foot-printing and reconnaissance, enumeration, Trojans, sniffers, social engineering, hacking web servers, SQL-injections, penetration testing and firewalls. CEH V11 provides greater focus in all the above points along with IoT hacking and vulnerability analysis.
An ethical hacker is responsible for much more such as engaging in social engineering approach, testing patch releases by performing various vulnerability tests, certified ethical hacker tests how he can avoid IDS(intrusion detection system), IPS(intrusion prevention system), honey pots and firewalls.
Ethical hackers can also do strategies like bypassing, cracking, sniffing network and hijacking web servers. Ethical hackers do scanning open and closed ports using Nessus and NMAP. An ethical hacker tries to duplicate the working of the black hat hacker by studying the defence protocols. his job is to make sure that the organization is safe.
What an ethical hacker do?
Hackers are innovators, they consistently find new ways to attack the information system and exploit system vulnerabilities. Ethical hackers or white hats are professionals use the skills and techniques hackers themselves use to identify system vulnerabilities and access points for penetration to prevent unwanted access of hackers to network and information systems. An ethical hacker should have a good grasping power in the following points:
- Password guessing and cracking,
- SQL injection,
- Section hijacking,
- Spoofing,
- DNS Spoofing,
- Identifying various network attacks,
- Exploit buffer overflow
The major point of an ethical hacker is he/she must be a creative thinker.
Ethical hacker job trend
According to the reports, the cybersecurity has emerged as a high growth field from 2017. During the past 5 years, cybersecurity job openings increased by 75%. The number of cybersecurity job is going to hit a huge number of openings by 2021. The cybersecurity jobs are plenty and the payment also good.
How much money an ethical hacker earn in India?
Certified ethical hacker earns 350000 per year. The average starting salary of a certified ethical hacker is 30000 per month. Those with a few years of experience can make an average of 5 lakh and upwards per year.
Ethical Hacking Career in India: Job profiles
After getting CEH certification, an ethical hacker can try for the following,
- Information security analyst,
- Security analyst,
- Certified ethical hacker,
- Ethical hacker,
- penetration tester,
- Information security manager
Companies hiring ethical hackers
An ethical hacker finds a job in any company which is in need of security consultant for their network infrastructure and its applications will require ethical hackers. Apart from you also get a chance to work with the military and secret intelligence-gathering groups.
I hope this blog gave you correct guidance to initiate your path to become an ethical hacker.
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