Overview of Ethical Hacking

Last updated on Nov 22 2021
Deepali Gupta

Table of Contents

Overview of Ethical Hacking

Hacking has been a neighborhood of computing for nearly five decades and it’s a really broad discipline, which covers a good range of topics. the primary known event of hacking had taken place in 1960 at MIT and at an equivalent time, the term “Hacker” was originated.

Hacking is that the act of finding the possible entry points that exist during a computing system or a network and eventually getting into them. Hacking is typically done to realize unauthorized access to a computing system or a network, either to harm the systems or to steal sensitive information available on the pc.

Hacking is typically legal as long because it is being done to seek out weaknesses during a computer or network system for testing purpose. this type of hacking is what we call Ethical Hacking.

A computer guru who does the act of hacking is named a “Hacker”. Hackers are those that seek knowledge, to know how systems operate, how they’re designed, then plan to play with these systems.

Types of Hacking

We can segregate hacking into different categories, supported what’s being hacked. Here may be a set of examples −

  • Website Hacking − Hacking an internet site means taking unauthorized control over an internet server and its associated software like databases and other interfaces.
  • Network Hacking − Hacking a network means gathering information a few network by using tools like Telnet, NS lookup, Ping, Tracert, Netstat, etc. with the intent to harm the network system and hamper its operation.
  • Email Hacking − It includes getting unauthorized access on an Email account and using it without taking the consent of its owner.
  • Ethical Hacking − Ethical hacking involves finding weaknesses during a computer or network system for testing purpose and eventually getting them fixed.
  • Password Hacking − this is often the method of recovering secret passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computing system.
  • Computer Hacking − this is often the method of stealing computer ID and password by applying hacking methods and getting unauthorized access to a computing system.

Advantages of Hacking

Hacking is sort of useful within the following scenarios −

  • To recover lost information, especially just in case you lost your password.
  • To perform penetration testing to strengthen computer and network security.
  • To put adequate preventative measures in situ to stop security breaches.
  • To have a computing system that forestalls malicious hackers from gaining access.

Disadvantages of Hacking

Hacking is sort of dangerous if it’s through with harmful intent. It can cause −

  • Massive security breach.
  • Unauthorized system access on private information.
  • Privacy violation.
  • Hampering system operation.
  • Denial of service attacks.
  • Malicious attack on the system.

Purpose of Hacking

There might be various positive and negative intentions behind performing hacking activities. Here may be a list of some probable reasons why people enjoys hacking activities −

  • Just for fun
  • Show-off
  • Steal important information
  • Damaging the system
  • Hampering privacy
  • Money extortion
  • System security testing
  • To break policy compliance

Ethical Hacking – Hacker Types

Hackers are often classified into different categories like white hat, black hat, and gray hat, supported their intent of hacking a system. These different terms come from old Spaghetti Westerns, where the person wears a black ten-gallon hat and therefore the person wears a white hat.

White Hat Hackers

White Hat hackers also are referred to as Ethical Hackers. They never intent to harm a system, rather they struggle to seek out out weaknesses during a computer or a network system as a neighborhood of penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.

Ethical hacking isn’t illegal and it’s one among the demanding jobs available within the IT industry. There are numerous companies that hire ethical hackers for penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.

Black Hat Hackers

Black Hat hackers, also referred to as crackers, are those that hack so as to realize unauthorized access to a system and harm its operations or steal sensitive information.

Black Hat hacking is usually illegal due to its bad intent which incorporates stealing corporate data, violating privacy, damaging the system, blocking network communication, etc.

Grey Hat Hackers

Grey hat hackers are a mix of both black hat and white hat hackers. They act without malicious intent except for their fun, they exploit a security weakness during a computing system or network without the owner’s permission or knowledge.

Their intent is to bring the weakness to the eye of the owners and getting appreciation or a touch bounty from the owners.

Miscellaneous Hackers

Apart from the above well-known classes of hackers, we’ve the subsequent categories of hackers supported what they hack and the way they are doing it −

Red Hat Hackers

Red hat hackers are again a mix of both black hat and white hat hackers. they’re usually on the extent of hacking government agencies, top-secret information hubs, and usually anything that falls under the category of sensitive information.

Blue Hat Hackers

A blue hat hacker is someone outside computer security consulting firms who is employed to bug-test a system before its launch. they appear for loopholes which will be exploited and check out to shut these gaps. Microsoft also uses the term BlueHat to represent a series of security briefing events.

Elite Hackers

This is a social station among hackers, which is employed to explain the foremost skilled. Newly discovered exploits will circulate among these hackers.

Script Kiddie

A script kiddie may be a non-expert who breaks into computer systems by using pre-packaged automated tools written by others, usually with little understanding of the underlying concept, hence the term Kiddie.

Neophyte

A neophyte, “n00b”, or “newbie” or “Green Hat Hacker” is someone who is new hacking or phreaking and has almost no knowledge or experience of the workings of technology and hacking.

Hacktivist

A hacktivist may be a hacker who utilizes technology to announce a social, ideological, religious, or political message. generally , most hacktivism involves website defacement or denialof-service attacks.

Ethical Hacking – Famous Hackers

In this chapter, we’ll have a quick synopsis of a number of the famous Hackers and the way they became famous.

Jonathan James

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Jonathan James was an American hacker, illfamous because the first juvenile sent to prison for cybercrime in us . He committed suicide in 2008 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In 1999, at the age of 16, he gained access to many computers by breaking the password of a server that belonged to NASA and stole the ASCII text file of the International space platform among other sensitive information.

Ian Murphy

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Ian Murphy, also referred to as Captain Zap, at one point of your time was having highschool students steal computer equipment for him. Ian selfproclaims to possess been “the first hacker ever convicted of a crime”.

Ian’s career as a master hacker was fabricated in 1986 after he and his unemployed wife decided to make some sort of business.

He features a long history of computer and Internet frauds. one among his favourite games is to forge Email headers and to send third-party threat letters.

Kevin Mitnick

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Kevin Mitnick may be a computer adviser and author, who infiltrates his clients’ companies to show their security strengths, weaknesses, and potential loopholes.

He is the primary hacker to possess his face immortalized on an FBI “Most Wanted” poster. He was formerly the foremost wanted computer criminal within the history of us .

From the 1970s up until his last arrest in 1995, he skilfully bypassed corporate security safeguards, and located his way into a number of the foremost well-guarded systems like Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Motorola, Netcom, and Nokia.

Mark Abene

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Mark Abene, known round the world by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is an information security expert and entrepreneur. He was a high-profile hacker within the 1980s and early 1990s. He was one among the primary hackers to openly debate and defend the positive merits of ethical hacking as a beneficial tool to industry.

His expertise spreads across penetration studies, on-site security assessments, secure code reviews, security policy review and generation, systems and specification , systems administration and network management, among many others. His clientele includes American Express, UBS, First USA, Ernst & Young, KPMG et al. .

Johan Helsinguis

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Johan Helsingius, better referred to as Julf, came into the limelight within the 1980s when he started operating the world’s hottest anonymous remailer, called penet.fi.

Johan was also liable for development for the primary Pan-European internet service provider, Eunet International.

He is at the present , a member of the board of Technologia Incognita, a hackerspace association in Amsterdam, and supports the communication companies worldwide together with his cyber knowledge.

Linus Torvalds

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Linus Torvalds is understood together of the simplest hackers of all time. He rose to fame by creating Linux, the very fashionable Unix-based OS . Linux is open source and thousands of developers have contributed to its Kernel. However, Torvalds remains the last word authority on what new code is incorporated into the quality Linux kernel. As of 2006, approximately two percent of the Linux kernel was written by Torvalds himself.

He just aspires to be simple and celebrate by making the world’s best OS . Torvalds has received honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and University of Helsinki.

Robert Morris

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Robert Morris, referred to as the creator of the Morris Worm, the primary computer worm to be unleashed on the web . The worm had the potential to hamper computers and make them not usable. As a results of this, he was sentenced to 3 years’ probation, 400 hours of community service and also had to pay a penalty amount of $10,500.

Morris is currently working as a tenured professor at the MIT computing and AI Laboratory.

Gary McKinnon

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Gary McKinnon may be a renowned systems administrator and hacker. He was famously accused of the “biggest military computer hack of all time”. He had successfully hacked the networks of Army, Air Force, Navy and NASA systems of the us government.

In his statements to the media, he has often mentioned that his motivation was only to seek out evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and therefore the suppression of “free energy” that would potentially be useful to the general public .

Kevin Poulsen

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Kevin Poulsen, also referred to as Dark Dante, became famous for his notoriety when he took over all the phonephone lines of l. a. station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller and win the prize of a Porsche 944 S2.

Poulsen also drew the ire of FBI, when he hacked into federal computers for wiretap information, that he had to serve a sentence of 5 years. He has reinvented himself as a journalist and has carved a distinct segment for himself during this field.

So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Overview of Ethical Hacking’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Cyber Security. If you wish to learn Ethical Hacking and build a career in Cyber Security domain, then check out our interactive, Certified Ethical Hacker Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

https://www.tecklearn.com/course/certified-ethical-hacker-training/

Certified Ethical Hacker Training

About the Course

Tecklearn’s CEH certification training course provides you the hands-on training required to master the techniques hackers use to penetrate network systems and fortify your system against it. In this training, you will master how to identify security vulnerabilities by inspecting network infrastructures and defend the malicious hacker with essential tools and techniques, advanced network packet analysis and system penetration testing techniques to build your network security skill-set and prevent hackers. We will train you on the advanced step-by-step methodologies that hackers actually use such as writing virus codes and reverse engineering so you can better protect corporate infrastructure from data breaches.

Why Should you take Certified Ethical Hacker Training?

  • The average salary for a Cybersecurity Specialist is $110,881 per year in the United States and INR 900,000 per year in India – Indeed.com
  • Global Cybersecurity industry is estimated to cross US$ 220 billion by 2021.
  • Today cyber security is one of the most important aspects for any organization. In today’s digitally-driven world every organization needs professionals who can keep the hackers at bay. Hence the salaries for certified ethical hackers are among the best in the industry.

What you will Learn in this Course?

Introduction to Ethical hacking

  • Scope of ethical hacking
  • Enterprise information security architecture
  • Introduction and PCI Data Security Standard Overview
  • Role of Security and Penetration Testers
  • Vulnerability assessment
  • Various cyber security laws
  • Penetration testing

Various aspects of Information Security

  • Information security attacks
  • OS attacks
  • Application level attacks
  • Phases and Concepts of Hacking
  • Information Security Law and Standards

System Hacking

  • What is System Hacking
  • Goals of System Hacking
  • Understanding the certified ethical hacker methodology
  • About Kali Linux
  • Hands On

Technology Standards

  • Introduction to F5 Technology and Terms
  • POS (Point of Sale ) , mPoS
  • What is GLBA Compliance
  • OWASP
  • Site monitoring Tools
  • Introduction to PCI DSS Standard

Semantics and Introduction to Footprinting

  • What is Semantics
  • Fuzzy Logic
  • Footprinting

Threats

  • Types of Threats
  • Threats against the Application
  • Threat modelling
  • Hands on

Threat modelling

  • Threat modelling with STRIDE model
  • Ways to Find Security Issues
  • Penetration Testing Tools
  • Modelling Models – Whiteboard Diagrams, Brainstorming, Structured Diagrams etc.
  • Trust Boundaries
  • Threat Trees
  • DREAD Model

Example of Attack

Vulnerability Scanning Tools

  • OpenVAS
  • Wapiti
  • Burp Suite Community
  • Metasploit

Threat Modelling with Different models

  • Various Threat Models
  • PASTA Model in Depth

Advanced concepts like network packet analysis

  • Network scanning
  • How to scan the network, overview of scanning
  • WireShark
  • Sniffing attacks
  • File Signature

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