Information security is a major concern for enterprises on a global scale and companies hire in-house ethical hackers to check their computers, servers, and devices for possible vulnerabilities. If we talk from the penetration tester's perspective, there is nothing unethical to have an in-house team of penetration testers who should be given the adequate amount of ethical hacking training in order to analyze from a hacker’s perspective with the awareness of information security.
In light of the recent update that hackers can now spy on you by listening to your screen, reported by Forbes, the corporate sector has started consulting a wide number of IT enterprises to secure their systems with the help of their penetration testing teams. This is where data security training plays a major role to provide ethical hacking training to penetration testing teams.
An in-depth ethical hacking training certification implies that your penetration testing team is quite competent enough in the field of ethical hacking and that your networking systems are secure enough to defend against bad hackers. And above that, an ethical hacking training certificate gives that true peace of mind to employers in terms of qualification and requirement thresholds for managing a penetration testing team.
With a lot of companies getting into the e-commerce world and implementing new technologies; for example cloud computing, the threat from forthcoming security breaches is increasing day by day. All this creates excessive demand for certified ethical hackers who have successfully completed their data and information security training sessions. This high demand is superseding the supply of ethical hackers who are certified in the field of ethical hacking.
Ethical Hacking Defined
Ethical hacking is now one of the 5 strategies to improve your organization’s cyber security. This is because ethical hacking is an effective method of analyzing an organization’s data security structure from a hacker’s view. Ethical hackers are also known as white hat hackers and are in high-demands in the market. The core job of ethical hackers is to decisively enter into security systems for fixing the points they are weak at so that black hat hackers don’t exploit them.
These white hat hacking professionals implement ways parallel to those that are applied by bad hackers, but they need to be one step or even two steps ahead of the game in order to beat their evil counterparts.
Mainly government institutes, financial institutes, and private IT firms hire ethical hackers to hack their clients’ networking systems with their prior permission to provide a true and fair picture of their security levels by highlighting loopholes that bad hackers can take advantage from.
What Does Ethical Hacking Involve?
Apart from everything, an effective ethical hacking requires mastering and getting command over problem-solving skills that are needed to make the systems stronger and more secure. A deeper understanding of how the computer systems and various programming languages function is also imperative because it makes the foreseeing job easier.
For instance, a client’s website is using a strong JavaScript based authentication method to defend against spammers’ fake queries. A certified ethical hacker would be able to test the functionality of the client’s website by switching off the JavaScript language from the web browser and submitting the email request. If that website is designed in a way that it accepts JavaScript disabled requests, the ethical hacker would get to know about it and suggest the programmers overcome this loophole.
An ethical hacker is able to:
- Test various applications
- Dial a network from a remote connection
- Test local networks and protocols
- Secure the wireless connection
- Re-engineer social hacking
Further, it goes deeper into penetration testing which involves assessing internet applications, computer systems and network infrastructures for possible vulnerabilities. A cohesive penetration team consisting of certified ethical hackers is deployed in IT companies to perform and monitor the entire process of ethical hacking for their clients and for themselves as well.
Why Is There A Need of Ethical Hackers in Penetration Testing Teams
Cybercrimes are increasing day after day and more sophisticated methods are being exploited by hackers to incur financial losses to companies operating worldwide. Most of the times, a number of terrorist organizations are backing these cybercriminals up for funding the entire hacking project. And in return, heavy ransoms are demanded from affected organizations.
Likewise, businesses today are facing a great number of challenges in their day to day operations with their complex security systems which of course need to be updated in order to prevent from being hacked by cyber culprits. Professional ethical hacking firms with specifically trained and certified ethical hackers are the last resort to such companies for ensuring maximum safety and confidentiality throughout.
Ethical Hacking as a Career
The field of ethical hacking has highly paid employees all over the world. Even a novice ethical hacker could demand a great pay scale from companies willing to hire ethical hackers for their penetration testing units. While the most experienced professionals are paid immensely to utilize and make use of their wide experiences in the field of ethical hacking. And besides that, getting a job in federal governmental institutes requires a professional ethical hacking certificate which is the finest degree of career for an individual and the best platform to pursue a sustainable life due to extra facilities and respect in such regulatory bodies.
Providing Ethical Hacking Training to your Penetration Testing Teams for Stronger Systems Security
It depends as to what level you are working on, or if you are an employer then what type of clients you possess. There are different levels of professional ethical hacking training available in institutes and even online. You’ll come across different modules your penetration testing team could go through while enrolling their ethical hackers in ethical hacking courses online. Providing information security training and certifications such as Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing will enable enterprises to protect their data and systems better.