Ethical Hacking Tutorial A beginner’s Guide

Ethical Hacking is a discipline widely followed by major big-wigs of the tech industry to protect their organization against any forthcoming probes from black hat hackers. In this Ethical Hacking Tutorial, I’ll be discussing some key points of this discipline that is being followed around the globe. The following topics will be discussed:

What is Ethical Hacking? Why is Ethical Hacking Important? What is a Security Threat? Types of Security Threats Security Threats: Preventive Measures Ethical Hacker Skills Why Learn Programming? Ethical Hacking Tools What is Social Engineering? Social Engineering Techniques Standard Cryptographic Algorithms RC4 Decryption Demonstration

Here’s a video version of this ethical hacking tutorial if you prefer to watch rather than read.

What is Ethical Hacking?

The act of hacking is defined as the process of finding a set of vulnerabilities in a target system and systematically exploiting them. Ethical Hacking as a discipline discerns itself from hacking by adding a vital element to the process ‘consent’. The addition of ‘consent’ to thisprocess serves two objectives

The process becomes a legal activity Since the ethical hacker takes permission prior to hacking into a system, it is legally made sure that he has no malicious intent. This is normally performed by making the ethical hacker sign contracts that legally bind him to work towards the improvement of the security of the company

Ergo , an ethical hacker is a computer security specialist, who hacks into a system with the consent or permission of the owner to disclose vulnerabilities in the security of the system in order to improve it. Now, let us go over the roles of an ethical hacker in this ethical hacking tutorial.

Ethical Hacker Roles Ethical hackershave various roles in the organization they work for. Considering the fact that ethical hacking is adopted by public and private organizations alike, goals may end up being diverse, but they can be boiled down to a few key points

Protect the privacy of the organization the ethical hacker is working for

Immaculately report any sort of discrepancy in the system to the corresponding division with the responsibility of mending the vulnerability

Update hardware and software vendors regarding any sort of vulnerabilities found in their product, that is being used to orchestrate business Why is Ethical Hacking Important?

Data hasbecome an invaluable resource. Accordingly, the preservation of privacy, and integrity of data has also increased in importance. In essence, this makes ethical hacking extremely important today! This is primarily due to the fact that almost every business out there has an internet facing side. Whether it be public relations, content marketing or sales, the internet is being used as a medium. This makes any endpoint that is being used to serve the medium, a possible vulnerability.

Furthermore, hackers of the present age, have proven themselves to be creative geniuses when it comes to penetrating into a system. Fighting fire with fire might not work in the real world, but to fight off a hacker so smart, an organization needs someone who has the same train of thought. Recent hacking outages have lead to losses amounting to millions of dollars. These incidents have cautioned businesses around the globe and made them rethink their stance on the importance ofethical hacking andcybersecurity.

Having laid down the grounds for ethical hackers after specifying their roles and importance to an organization, let us move forward and discuss some key elements of ethical hacking in this ethical hacking tutorial.

What is a Security Threat?

As anethical hacker, your daily routine will include dealing with a bunch of security threats.

Any risk that has the potential to harm a system or an organization as a whole is a security threat. Let’s go over the types of security threats.

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Types of Security Threats

Threats are of two types:

Physical Threats

Physical threats are further divided into three categories.

Internal e.g. hardware fire, faulty power supply, internal hardware failures etc External e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes etc Human e.g. vandalism, arson, accidental errors etc

Non-Physical Threats

Non-physical threats include every threat that has no physical manifestation. They are also known as logical threats. Below is a picture of the most common non-physical threats:

An ethical hacker generally deals with non-physical threats on a daily basis, and it is his responsibility, to come up with preventive measures for these threats.

Security Threats: Preventive Measures

While most preventive measures adopted by ethical hackers tend to differ for every organization due to customized needs, they can be boiled down to some key methodologies that areubiquitously followed

Every organization must have a logical security measure in place. This could also include cognitive cybersecurity measures adopted by an organization which operates on an incident response system. Authentication can be improved and made more efficient by using multi-factor authentication systems. Authentication methods can be in the form of user IDs and strong passwords, smart cards, captchas, biometric, etc. For protection against entities like worms, trojans, viruses etc. organizations sometimes use specially curated anti-viruses that are made keeping the company’s special needs in mind. Additionally, an organization may also find it beneficial to usecontrol measures on the use of external storage devices and visiting the website that is most likely to download unauthorized programs onto the target computer. Intrusion-detection/prevention systems can be used to protect against denial of service attacks. There are other measures too that can be put in place to avoid denial of service attacks.

Having discussed the types of threats an ethical hacker deals with regularly, let’s go over the skills that are required to be able to deal with the discussed threats in this ethical hacking tutorial.

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