With the amount of data that is being meted out by billions of connected user devices and organizational systems, Cybersecurity has taken center stage as one of the most important focal points of any firm’s IT teams. From social media giants to large enterprises, every industry has been a victim of unprecedented data breaches and ransomware attacks in the recent past. But despite most of us knowing about the importance of Cybersecurity and the deployment of safety nets to protect against threats, we know very little on the people that initiate these attacks.
Behind most of these attacks are cyber-criminals or more commonly known as hackers. These are people who find ways to either infiltrate systems or modify them to make them perform actions that the creator intended them to originally perform. These hackers are conventionally after financial rewards but sometimes or forms of malicious intent like undue political activism is just as common.
The modus operandi of hackers is that they try to find loopholes in a system’s security infrastructure like zero day vulnerabilities and then work towards breaking in in order to wrest control of the system from the actual administrators. In Cybersecurity domain, they are known as Black hat hackers and organizations spend millions in recruiting the best talent from the Cybersecurity field along with installing the most updated systems in order to ensure that they black hat hackers are not successful in their attempts.
But as most of them have found out, these practices do make the job harder for cybercriminals but not impossible and with a little more effort, they can go past nearly all kinds of Cybersecurity blocks. So what’s the best approach to stop cybercriminals from attacking a certain, sensitive system?
There is a very old saying that the best way to stop a criminal is to think like one and the same holds true in the case of these black hat hackers. In the past couple of years, firms have become increasingly reliant on ethical hackers to protect their systems from cybercriminals.
Ethical hackers work on the same lines as cybercriminals, deploying the same tactics and tools to etch out system vulnerabilities but instead of wreaking havoc on a system like black hat hackers do, these ethical hackers make the system vulnerabilities known to system admins so that they can patch them up and close an end from where a potential attack could have been initiated.
While this strategy has been unconventional, it has been incredibly effective in performing the actual job assigned to it as ethical hackers are fast becoming the biggest roadblock towards black hat hacker’s pursuits in the cyber domain.
If you are working in an organization’s Cybersecurity team, then you too can benefit off of this highly lucrative field, but for this you have to know more about the types of ethical hacking being offered out there:
White Hat Hackers
These are the most typical type of ethical hackers but they often don’t work for firms in any official capacity. They usually go solo, working their art on different Cybersecurity systems to find out vulnerabilities before making them public so that everyone knows they exist and instantaneous remedial action can be taken system or software admins to close off these gaps once and for all.
However, most firms shy away from hiring them to work for them in an official capacity because even though they might be good at their jobs, they don’t have any sort of skills validation on their end to justify their credibility or trustworthiness.
Red Team Professionals
They are same as white hat hackers but they only have one major point of difference and that is, they work in an official capacity for firms to find out flaws in cyber systems and software. These professionals are often employees of the firm’s own Cybersecurity teams who have extensive knowledge about hacking and they put it to use for the firm’s benefit. Organizations often pit them against blue teams who are assigned the task of fixing the system’s security shortcomings as soon as red teams find them out.
How Can You Become a Red Team Professional And What Are Its Benefits?
While often skills are the most basic criteria for becoming a red team professional, organizations are now changing the way they find and recruit personnel to be part of their red teams. Since this task is so sensitive, firms require validation of skills that can easily be acquire by aspiring individuals by completing certifications related to ethical hacking. These certifications allow individuals to negotiate better salaries from organizations since they are bringing a very rare skill set that can benefit the organization immensely.
On top of this, information security certifications are also considered highly relevant for the field of ethical hacking within red teams and firms value them equally when searching for individuals to initiate acts like penetration testing in their systems.
If you become a certified ethical hacker, then you can also offer your skills as a consultant, thereby diversifying your career choices and allowing you to open up an entirely different and valuable revenue stream for yourself.
In the recent past, the demand for certified ethical hackers has grown significantly so it makes a lot of sense for you to enroll yourself in one. Ethical hacking certifications come with varying expertise levels ranging from beginners to advanced courses that can allow individuals to grow their skills repertoire in the most streamlined way possible without following any unconventional strategies.
Conclusion
The number of cyber attacks continues to grow significantly each year with some predictions even saying that these attacks could be causing trillions of dollars in damage to organizations in the next few years. So even if career paths in the field of ethical hacking are limited or vague right now, they are sure to be next most trending ones in the upcoming years, therefore you, as an IT professional, should seriously consider opting for ethical hacking certifications in order to prime yourself as a top candidate for such emerging jobs in the near future.