Ethical Hacker Training : Leading Method To Prevent Against Malicious

In an earlier era, it was a widely-accepted practice that the FBI and other criminal or investigative firms would take convicted criminals and "flip" them in order to learn about their methods and how to prevent a repeat of their offenses. Keeping them on the payroll ensured that they would not become repeat offenders, but also that they would help fight the type of crime they once committed.

The same is true of what is now known as "hacker training" or "ethical hacking." In the modern era of high technology and highly sensitive information spread around the world's servers, it is important to ensure the integrity of that information and identify weaknesses in a network's security or encryption that could lead to hacking and the release of such sensitive information.

Ethical Hacker Training

One of the leading methods in preventing against these malicious hacking attempts comes in the form of training courses that specialize in ethical hacking. These courses span the gamut of all modern hacking methodologies and technologies. They teach students how to hack simple desktop computer systems as well as high-end web servers which are guarded with extremely tough firewalls and encryption.

These ethical hacker training courses also educate their students in the creation and deployment of such nefarious technologies as viruses, trojans, and malware. Students are taught how to use these simple computer programs to exploit anywhere from one to hundreds of thousands of computers at the same time, releasing sensitive information and bypassing user controls on its release. Similarly, many ethical hacking courses teach students to create "phishing" scams. These phishing scams overtake a user's online accounts such as Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, and others and allow the hacker to have remote control of the account and its contents.

Ethical hacking also includes things like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which overloads a website's server or servers with too many page requests and causes the entire website to crash and become inaccessible to the public.

Using Ethical Hackers

Once a potential ethical hacker successfully completes this ethical hacker training course, which can span anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on the pace of the course and how long it takes the student to understand the information, they are put to use by provate companies as well as government agencies.

Putting these so-called ethical hackers to use is important to ensure the integrity of confidential information. Using skills they've learned through their training, they will systematically go through every single method they know in an attempt to successfully hack a server and retrieve confidential and secure documents. Once they become successful, their employer can make necessary changes to ensure that the same method cannot be exploited a second time. And because they've employed an "ethical" hacker rather than been attacked by an outside group, they're secure in the knowledge that any data retrieved by these methods won't be leaked to the public.

This is especially important in an era of WikiLeaks document releases (from the United States Department of State, no less) and the myriad successful hacking and denial of service attempts by a group known as "Anonymous." These groups have successfully distributed secret State documents as well as taken down the websites of such big names as Visa.com, PayPal, and many other companies.

Because the internet is full of secrets from social security numbers and credit card information to State Department cables and government documents it's important to ensure its integrity, as well as give its users the confidence of knowing that their information will remain safe and secure. Ethical hackers test the system and oftentimes break through it; their training allows them to point out loopholes to their employers, fixing security flaws before anyone in the outside world has any idea that they're present. It is truly an indispensable tool for the realities of 21st century computing.