Working with an actual mindset of a black hat hacker- an essential trait of a successful ethical hacker

Should help saves money, time, and human resources for creating a highly secure product for an organization

Ethical hacking is relatively a new field and a lot of people still consider it as an illegal profession. Over the years, this profession is strongly associated with the negative vibe, it was initially considered as a creative way for finding the possibilities to optimize the system but not anymore. When the computer intelligence started to get misused, it is then, this act was given the term hacker or black hat hacker. Hackers are the one involved in malicious activities with the goal to harm people. Hacking can be done for numerous reasons including monetary benefits, fame, revenge, and fun; they are also termed as digital trespassers, but at the same time there are some hackers that work against the black hat hackers and help people to protect them against these hackers; called Ethical hackers.

With the advancement in Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and evolution in big data, the systems are exposed more to cyber-attacks. However, different security tools are developed and are developing to counter these type of attacks. The biggest challenge that any can organization face is the migration of the whole system or their database to cloud; this is the phase in which the data and the system is the most weakest and hackers tends to attack the system in this phase and gain maximum profit from organizations. Even after the system architecture and data is migrated onto the cloud, the server is not physically present, organizations still have their concerns regarding total cloud dependence.

Ethical hackers are given the responsibility of going the same job as any black hat hacker but they are permitted to do so by either the person himself or by an organization. Ethical hacker reports the identified issues so that organizations can improve. Over the years, organizations have realized the importance of ethical hacking, some from their own harsh experiences, and some with the experience of others. Some of the benefits of having an ethical hacker are as following:

• Ethical hackers can help in saving money, time, and effort of an IT team.
• Ethical hackers can give a perspective of an actual hacker and help in improving the security of the system of an organization.
• Ethical hackers performs the security testing differently than a regular tester which exposes the weakness of the system in a different manner.  
• Ethical hackers help the organization and its IT team to evaluate the performance of the system in a real-world situation like a response of the system in a heavy customer traffic load.
• Ethical hackers can help in defining and modifying the security standards for an organization.
• Ethical hackers can help analyze the past systems and identify the common vulnerable parts including identifying the problem in an architecture of the systems that can be reduced for future IT projects.
• Ethical hackers helps in making the development process fast, efficient, and effective.
• Ethical hackers help organizations create a strong and secure product to develop trust in clients.
• Ethical hackers can also help in developing tools that can protect organizations and systems against malicious attacks.
• In recent years, ethical hackers have also worked closely with the national security agencies of different countries to help secure their national websites and play an effective role against cyber-terrorism.
• Through ethical hackers, the international community has realized the importance of security of data on the cloud, problems with identity theft,  an alarming role of terrorist involvement in the cyber-attacks, etc.
• Ethical hackers can propose an effective mechanism to improve the protection of  an organization’s assets.

 It is important for an ethical hacker to be up-to-date with the developments and technologies in the hacking world so that they can work against it. They as an information security expert need to think like an actual hacker for better results. There is a dire need for an ethical hacker, in the IT world; who is professional, loyal, and most importantly with principles.