Ethical hacking refers to the act of locating weaknesses and vulnerabilities of computer and information systems by duplicating the intent and actions of malicious hackers. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing, or red teaming. An ethical hacker is a security professional who applies their hacking skills for defensive purposes on behalf of the owners of information systems. By conducting penetration tests, an ethical hacker looks to answer the following four basic questions [1] : What information/locations/systems can an attacker gain access?
What can an attacker see on the target?
What can an attacker do with available information?
Does anyone at the target system notice the attempts?
An ethical hacker operates with the knowledge and permission of the organization for which they are trying to defend. In some cases, the organization will neglect to inform their information security team of the activities that will be carried out by an ethical hacker in an attempt to test the effectiveness of the information security team. This is referred to as a double-blind environment. In order to operate effectively and legally, an ethical hacker must be informed of the assets that should be protected, potential threat sources, and the extent to which the organization will support an ethical hacker's efforts [2].
Ethical Hacking History
Since the 1980's, the Internet has vastly grown in popularity and computer security has become a major concern for businesses and governments. Organizations would like to use the Internet to their advantage by utilizing the Internet as a medium for e-commerce, advertising, information distribution and access, as well as other endeavors. However, they remain worried that they may be hacked which could lead to a loss of control of private and personal information regarding the organization, its employees, and its clients.
In a search for ways to reduce the fear and worry of being hacked, organizations have come to the realization that an effective way to evaluate security threats is to have independent security exerts attempt to hack into their computer systems. In the case of computer security, these tiger teams or ethical hackers would use the same tools and techniques as an attacker, but rather than damage the system or steal information, they would evaluate the system security and report the vulnerabilities they found and provide instructions for how to remedy them [3].
From the early days of computers, ethical hacking has been used as an evaluation of system security. Many early ethical hacks were conducted by the United States Military to cary out security evaluations on their operating systems to determine whether they should employ a two-level (secret/top secret) classification system. However, with the growth of computing and networking in the early 1990's, computer and network vulnerability studies began to appear outside of the military organization. In December of 1993, two computer security researchers,
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