DIGITAL OMAN -
By Sangeetha Sridhar -
In the IT world parlance, the word ‘hacking’ is considered malicious. On the contrary it originated to denote clever programmers who hated controlled access to system and hence curiously broke into networks and computers. However, at a time when cyber crime motivated by financial and political power, has matured to organised crime circles, ‘ethical hacking’ is more closely associated with security rather than to crime.
In the cyber space, ethical hacking is the art and skill of penetrating a network or computer system in order to find out its vulnerabilities or weaknesses to fix them and make it more secure instead of exploiting those for personal benefits.
The word had its origin in 1960 when IBM first used it to address its IT security professional’s work of testing their networks like a hacker, in order to defend it better.
The US military has been covertly involved in ethical hacking; a modern trend of adoption is seen in the corporate sector these days.
Influenced by Hollywood heroes and villains, there emerged the white-hat hackers and the black-hat hackers to label the good and evil within the hacker community. White hat hackers are normally appointed or even engaged as security experts.
The International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants, known as the EC-Council is perhaps the largest body of professionals connected to security and ethical hacking. They have developed a framework of professional qualification to practise in this field. This framework can be downloaded at http://tinyurl.com/292zjbp.
Currently, EC-Council is supporting the International Multilateral Partnership against Cyber Threats (Impact) that is a partner organisation of the United Nations/International Telecommunication Union (UN/ITU) to provide training and technical support to governments of UN member states.
Every year hackers, computer security professionals and code-cracking enthusiasts attend the world’s largest convention — the DEF CON in Las Vegas, Nevada. Apart from regular featured presentations and demonstrations, the event includes several competitions including the famous Capture the Flag (CTF) — a live hacking and defence competition. It is interesting trivia to know that in 2001, a Russian programmer was arrested after DEF CON for writing software to decrypt Adobe’s e-book format.
Tools for ethical hacking are plenty online and even a simple Google search is enough for a few free downloads. But depending on the security feature being tested, the choice of tools differ. There are password crackers, network sniffers, penetration testers, fingerprint enumerators, Trojans, backdoors, keyboard loggers, tools for launching phishing attacks and Denial of Service attacks, etc. For example the Rainbow Crack can crack hashed coded secure passwords. The ZeNmap tool can scan a network range and return port lists and statuses.
— The author is a technology evangelist who can be contacted at sendsangita@gmail.com or http://digitaloman.blogspot.com or
www.twitter.com/sangitasri