All hacking is not bad. And all hackers do not mean to steal your money or important information, although some do it certainly. However, many hackers use their talent and curiosity to protect your information and safeguard you from cyber hacking. These people are known as white hat hackers and what they do is ethical hacking. Ethical hacking is not cheap and needs a high calibre of talent. Although ethical hackers do not steal, they certainly are compensated well by companies to help them protect their valuable resources and information. If you’re looking to build a career in cybersecurity then you might want to understand a bit more about ethical hacking.
What is ethical hacking?
Ethical hackers work pretty much the way a black hat hacker works. From finding vulnerabilities, infiltrating systems to breaking into your cyberspace, a white hat hacker does all of the following. However, the biggest difference is an ethical hacker knows all of these to secure your system and seal all your vulnerable areas thus making them inaccessible to hackers.
Becoming an ethical hacker
First thing first. You need to be avid learner if you wish to become an ethical hacker. You need to understand that technology is evolving every single day, and to make a profession in ethical hacking, you need to keep yourself up-to-date with all the updates. Hackers often use extremely advanced technologies to break into a system, and to stop them, you need to equipped equally. In short, you need to learn, unlearn, and then re-learn continuously. Additionally, to begin with, you need to be strong in network and web security skills along with a stronghold on programming and coding. You should be adept with at least one coding language, to begin with. Ensure you understand operating systems well and the basic concepts of OS.
Platform to select
At Sygitech we leverage different platforms. For example, for web applications, we use HTML, PHP, and Ruby while for the mobile application development we extensively use Java for Android, C# for Windows phone, and Swift for iOS. So, choose a platform you’re comfortable working on. I would also recommend Python because it is getting hugely popular these days given its easy portability. Having said all of these, I would still strongly emphasize that you build your programming fundamentals strong because that would be your foundation. And if your foundation is not strong enough, you are going to fall flat. No matter how many programming languages you know, you must be familiar with the fundamentals of programming concepts like what is data types, use of subroutines (functions) variable manipulation, and so on. If you are strong with your fundamentals, you need not worry much because rest all are just syntax that changes from one program to another.
Here are some tips that will help you get started as an ethical hacker
Read every day. The more you read the better hold you have on the current trends and industry. Read articles, interviews, blogs, watch videos to educate yourself. With so much free resources floating around for free, you shouldn’t keep yourself restricted.
Self-education is the best. Of course, you can enroll yourself in some ethical hacking courses but unless you start experiencing them yourself, you won’t be learning much. Remember, you don’t learn to swim unless you get into the water.
Be agile. Agility is a must if you want to excel and make a career in ethical hacking. You have to be swift, like a ninja. Act swiftly and precisely to know the map and target.
Think out-of-the-box. This is critical. Remember, hackers always look for ways to get into your system.To prevent them, you need to think like a hacker. Think out-of-the-box and choose a path that no one would have otherwise thought to consider.
Ethical hacking is often thrilling and you can get a lot of motivation from the healthy competition with another ethical hacker or ethical hacking team. It can be often seen as a game between two teams and it’s thrilling to see who stops the other one first.
In short, ethical hacking helps to keep your system safe and secure from the hackers who infiltrate to cause damage to you and your business.
