Ethical hacking- intruding into the system like a hacker but with owner’s permission; commonly referred as pen testing

Ethical hacking- time-consuming, niche, rapidly changing, and excessive learning sub-domain of system security 

In recent years, lots of progress has been made in the field of cyber-security. A lot of researches has been done in this field and has provided opportunities to create new job opportunities in the market. With the evolution of ethical hacking, the dynamics of network security and other security testing has changed.

Now a days organizations have realized the importance of testing and especially penetration testing; testing the system to identify the loopholes in the security level of the system by which a hacker can access into their system and cause damage. The professional name for pen testing or penetration testing is ethical hacking.

The main advantage of ethical hacking is that it is a very open and easily accessible field. With the digital transformation, students tends to learn a lot of things and concept online aside from their degree. Initially hacking or ethical hacking was not a field few years back. It was a field that was created by computer science students with both positive and negative aspects. Hacking and more precisely ethical hacking has now become a complete certification. Different websites and companies holds hacking competitions to test the hacking skills and test their systems at the same time.

In order to become an ethical hacker, it depends on an individual’s talent and passion. All most all renowned ethical hackers even black-hat and gray-hat hackers are self-taught. They chose this field due to their interest. Ethical hacking, unlike other jobs such as software developer, system engineer, or system architect, is a complete different path which involves high risk.

Ethical hacking- a demanding field

Ethical hacking is a very technical field which requires expertise, talent, time, dedication, and excessive learning skills. Every task is a new challenge for ethical hackers and they need to be careful to get the results within the tight working boundaries defined by organizations. For every new task they need to think like an actual hacker and try to break the system. They, with time, needs to put more efforts because organizations upon their suggestions are upgrading their system’s security level. Ethical hackers need both the theoretical and practical knowledge to improve their skills. With the rapid evolution in technology, different algorithms and protocols are introduced. Ethical hackers also need to increase their knowledge base of different new techniques, tools, and protocols. The only key to become a successful ethical hacker is to learn constantly. Some of the suggestions for ethical hackers to improve their skills are as follows:

• Try to increase the knowledge base by getting different ethical hacking certifications.
• Get the basic book knowledge at the initial level
• Take part in ethical hacking competitions
• Be aware of the new techniques that are introduced
• Try to explore and test skills by trying out different companies bug bounty programs or vulnerability disclosure programs
• Some of the renowned ethical hackers are also cyber-security researchers, hence ethical hackers need to have the tendency to research and explore

It is evident that ethical hacking itself is a vast field and has many subdomains like malware detection, forensics, auditing, and social engineering. It is a hectic job which requires a lot of efforts and it is still a growing market.

Basic skills set required to become an ethical hacker

The basic knowledge set that an ethical hacker requires includes:

• Programming skills
• Expertise in operating systems
• Knowledge of networking
• Fundamental hacking tools
• Basic programming languages for the type of application to target
• Learn assembly language
• Database knowledge

At the end of the day, if it is an interesting and opportunistic field risky at the same time because things can get worse in no time. It is for this reason, companies when hire an ethical hacker either for a post or outsource them as an individual to test their system, they clearly defines the working conditions. These working conditions are very narrow and with a little mistake can finish an ethical hacker’s career. So, an ethical hacker needs to follow their rules and get their job done.