An introduction to Ethical Hacking

Sep 02, 09 An introduction to Ethical Hacking

Disclaimer: If you want you want to use the information that I will provide in this and future articles to break into computers maliciously, neither I, nor area72.ro or anyone else associated with the information provided shall be liable or responsible for any unethical procedures you may make using this series of articles.They are intended solely for those that want to test information security in an authorized manner.

Ethical Hacking. What does it mean ?

Ethical Hacking is the discipline of finding security vulnerabilities on computers and networks and securing them before a maliciously intended person has the chance of exploiting them.

Let’s break it into 2 : ethical and hacking.

Ethical – The perfect dictionary explanation is the following : “Being in accordance with the accepted principles of right and wrong that govern the conduct of a profession.”

Hacking – Is the action that a hacker does, harmful or not, depending on his ethical or unethical principles.

Basically, hacker refers to a person that likes to test, discover and experiment new ideas.Nowadays, people give the term another meaning : a person that maliciously breaks into systems and steals personal information.

The hackers themselves spread into three categories :

  • white-hatwhite-hats
  • black-hatblack-hats
  • grey-hatgray-hats

The white-hats – are the ethical-driven hackers.

The black-hats – are the unethical-driven hackers; the ones that do harm to your computer.

The gray-hat – are the hackers somewhere in between white and black.They like/practice both of them.

Trivia : The terms white-hat and black-hat come from the Western movies where the good guy wore a white cowboy hat and the bad guy wore a black one.The gray-hat was just invented from the combination of two to describe the “guy in the middle”.

Now that you know the terminology, you should not give “hacker” a negative meaning like most of the people do.

Hope you enjoyed the article.See you in the next one.

Related posts:

  1. Types of Hackers
  2. May 2010 – The Month of PHP Security

7 Comments

  1. Cornescu Andrey /

    Great post, I really didn’t know that their names derive from Western movies

  2. Agreed with it.!! I am highly infleunced by ethical hacking but never had a chance to learn them completely. May be this can give us some more exposure.

  3. empyrion martyr /

    Good thing you’re spreading the news around, people tend to include all hackers in the black hat category.

    Oh, and to Andrei Cornescu, “salut fratie, sa ai noroc cu hackingu :D gray hat sau white :-” “

  4. Thanks, “scuze dar nu prea imi pot da seama cine esti, oricum mersi”.

  5. Treva Cretsinger /

    Strange this post is totaly unrelated to what I was searching google for, but it was listed on the first page. I guess your doing something right if Google likes you enough to put you on the first page of a non related search. :)

  6. Wow!
    Awesome Post!
    Really a very nice and detailed review, Your analysis and description is very good and helpful to the beginners.
    By the way for more information Professional Training and Certification for Ethical Hacking check this link: http://www.eccouncil.org/certification/certified_ethical_hacker.aspx

  7. Thanks very much.I know the link you posted, thanks.

Leave a Reply


Warning: Unknown: write failed: Disk quota exceeded (122) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0