Ethical Hacking - For Beginners

The explosive growth of the Internet has brought many good things: e-commerce, easy access to vast repositories of reference material, collaborative computing, email, and new avenues for advertising and information distribution, to name a few. Like most technological advances, there is also a dark side: criminal hackers. Governments, businesses, and private citizens around the world are eager to be part of this revolution but fear that a hacker might invade their web server, replace their logo with pornography, read their emails, steal credit card numbers from an online shopping site, or implant software that secretly transmits their organization's secrets to the open Internet. With these concerns and more, the ethical hacker can help. This article describes ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they assist their clients in finding and closing security gaps. The process of ethical hacking is explained, along with many of the issues that the Global Security Analysis Lab encountered during its early years of ethical hacking for IBM clients.