Ethical Hacking : How can one learn and shine in their career?

Content Coverage :​ What is hacking? | Types of Hackers? | Types of Hacking? | What is Ethical hacking? | Processes of Ethical?hacking? | Skills required to learn Ethical hacking? | Career Opportunities in Ethical hacking?

T​ oday, the entire world is going online. Schools, colleges, institutes, offices everything is now being migrated to the virtual mode due to the pandemic situation. People are meeting each other with video calls, conferences and meetups. All this is beneficial for us, right? Because in spite of this Lockdown, we are meeting each other so this is great, but have you ever questioned about the safety of all those online alternatives? As we are migrating to the online world, as online facilities are getting increased , more number of cyber crime investigators and more number of ethical hackers are in need to protect these facilities from getting hacked. As a result, there is a biggest career opportunity for all the engineering aspirants which is named as ‘Ethical hacking’. Now, let’s understand that term deeply.

What is hacking?

​ Hacking is an unauthorized process to penetrate into a computer system. Simply, it is the unauthorized access to a computer system for some illegal intention​ . Some people do utilize the computer deep techniques to penetrate through the computer systems and they misuse the data obtained.
To minimize such attacks on computer systems and for assuring the data safety, ethical hackers play a prominent role in keeping the data safe. Ethical hackers know all the hacking techniques but they use that information for legal hacking or for protecting the data.

Types of Hackers?

Basically, there are three types of hackers which are Black hat hackers, White hat hackers, Gray hat hackers.

Black hat hackers are the people who try to penetrate through the computer systems and use the data for the illegal purpose. White hat hackers are those who use the deep hacking techniques against the black hat hackers and protect the data from them. Gray hat hackers generally do hacking but without the illegal intention and they work with the administrator or owner of the computer systems to notify them about the weaknesses of the system so as to improve them.

Types of Hacking?

Hacking is overall an illegal process, yet it has types based upon the way of attack and the intensity of loss.

Hacking can be mainly classified as ‘Social engineering and phishing’ , ‘Malware injection’ , ‘Missing security patches’, ‘cracking passwords’, ‘distributed-denial of services’. All of them are having the common intention of data gathering but they have different impacts on the victim.

What is Ethical hacking?

Now, let’s understand how we can define ethical hacking. Ethical simply means legal, so here ethical hacking means penetrating through the computer systems and accessing the data points of a computer system and detecting the weak points of a system so that it can be improved before the attack of illegal members.

There is a term called ‘Vulnerability’ which can be defined as the weak points of a computer system or loopholes through which black hat hackers can penetrate and destroy the system. So, ethical hackers generally play an important role in finding the vulnerabilities of a system and notifying them to the owner of the system so that the respective data remains safe.

Processes of Ethical hacking?

There is a specific way in which an ethical hacker performs his task. So, I will just explain to you that entire path in a simple way through the following diagram.

As the above diagram represents, ethical hacking has some fixed process and generally these people follow this process to penetrate into a system. In a first step ethical hackers gather all the information about the system in which they are going to penetrate.

Skills required to learn Ethical Hacking?

If we talk about the skills needed to become an ethical hacker, there would be a great contribution of technical knowledge. Problem solving skill, critical thinking, and deep analysis are some of the personal skills required for ethical hacking. Now let’s go through the technical skills.
Ethical hacking and mainly hacking is related to computer networking because IP address is one of the most important things to be noted while discussing any hacking case. Hence, a good ethical hacker must have ​ networking concepts cleared to him; in addition to this he should have strong knowledge ​ of Linux operating system​ and command line interface. Any one ​ programming language​ is mandatory to develop computer logic.

Career Opportunities in Ethical hacking?

As technology and digitalisation is on rise in the world, more number of cyber crimes will be there and as data is the crucial part of digital world, people will try to fetch that for some misuse or for getting some benefits so more number of cyber crime investigators and more number of anti-hacking departments will be in need. So, ethical hacking is the career which is having the greater scope and opportunities in coming years. As more people become aware ofdigitalization, more will be the opportunities in the ethical hacking sector. So, if you are having the proper guidance, right mindset and a strong desire to keep on updating your knowledge then you are having a big opportunity to make a great career which can be useful for keeping the data safe. Some important points below to get started with ethical hacking
it and have a great future ahead, all the best!
1) Computer Networking
2) Deep web, Dark web
3) Kali Linux and Terminal Commands
4) Certified Ethical Hacking (CEH by EC Council)
5) Penetration testing
6) Bug Bounty
7) IP address