Hacking: An ethical perspective

“Can hacking be made completely Ethical?”, has turned out to be a million-dollar question of the 21^st century. The simple answer however is a big NO. As it is said “if God exists then even demons do exist” similarly if an ethical hacker exists then his unethical counterpart also exists in some part of the world.

Let’s explore what this ethical, unethical fuss is all about and before that what hacking itself is?

In common terms, hacking basically is stealing of information from someone’s electronic device, but on a broader scale hacking involves targeting of high end servers to bring them down, network jamming causing denial of service and lots of other deadly attack on a PC, network or a server.

The ‘ethical’ version of hacking has been the talk of the town ever since hacking came into picture. It continues to be an unsolved riddle for many, as to how hacking can be made ethical, when the very term of hacking itself is considered a crime by cyber police.

Now, consider a situation in which your friend challenges you to hack his FB account. You do it successfully. Congrats, you will shortly face a trial in cyber court. That is because even though your friend might have given you permission in writing to hack his FB account, but the fact is that your friend does not own Facebook. He only has an account in it. Mark Zuckerburg can sue you in a cyber court. So need to be really careful.

Well, hacking does have a lot of merits, which is a major reason why people are considering ethical hacking as a profession and new courses on the same are being taught. Here is a look up at when exactly can we call hacking as ethical.

Ethical hacking usually is done by an organization itself to explore loopholes in its network security. Usually a written statement is given by the organization to the hacker that he will not be under any threat if he succeeds in hacking. An organization hires a certified hacker to try and hack into its network and get critical information. Now the hacker can either succeed or fail in hacking. If he fails its good, because this implies that the company has a strong network security which is if highly difficult, if not impossible to be hacked. The other scenario could be that the hacker succeeds in what he is up to. But this absolutely causes no loss to the company since it is aware of what’s happening. In fact, this helps the organization in identifying the flaws in its network security and thus improving the same. The ethical hacker however after finishing his work should not leave any footprints behind which could aid a not ethical hacker to re hack the system. Greater luxuries of hacking, are however enjoyed by Indian intelligence bureau who intercept conversations which are fishy. Not only the Indian intelligence agencies, other top intelligence agencies have got an army of hackers who are deemed to be “ethical” because they are working for the good or at least to prevent the bad.

So, for those of you who are excited to pursue a career as an ethical hacker, here are the three most sought after courses in this domain:

·      Certified Ethical Hacker V9(CEH).

·      Global Information Assurance Certification Penetration tester(GIAC)

·      Offensive Security Certified professional(OSCP)