When you first heard of the term hacking? Was it when someone said their Facebook account is hacked? Sounds about right, yeah? Did that invite an urge to learn ‘how to hack someone’s social media accounts?’ If the answer is yes, you have stumbled upon the right blog post.

What is Ethical Hacking? – Uncovering the Hidden Myths

When you first heard of the term hacking? Was it when someone said their Facebook account is hacked? Sounds about right, yeah? Did that invite an urge to learn ‘how to hack someone’s social media accounts?’ If the answer is yes, you have stumbled upon the right blog post.

Hacking is not limited to breaking into the personal accounts of people. The picture is way bigger than what meets the eyes. Let’s start with this!Are you under the impression that you are safe digitally? If you haven’t realized the importance of cybersecurity as yet, this article might help you a great deal. Let’s begin with the aftermath of a coordinated cyber attack.

A recent report conducted by Lloyd’s of London estimates that a well-coordinated worldwide cyber attack could result in economic losses around $53 billion. The element of surprise here is that this amount similar to the costs from U.S. Superstorm Sandy in 2012 (Reuters, 2017).

People who speak money might get the message now. Now is the time to strengthen cybersecurity. It’s time to identify vulnerabilities in the system and improve your cyber guards there. But, before laying plans to strengthen cybersecurity, we need to deal with the misinformation already spread in the market. In this blog post, we have addressed a few ethical hacking myths to widen and clarify your knowledge perspective. Follow through:

All hackers aren’t alike

A hacker as the term defines breaks into a system and alter or retrieve the data in it. To a lot of people, this definition of hacker boils down to major security breaches where a massive amount of crucial information is compromised in a matter of seconds. But, all hackers are not the same. Ethical hackers break into the system to test the health of IT security.

There are considerable benefits of ethical hacking. It indicates the strengths and weaknesses of the program which allows programmers to fix small issues that might result in major breakdowns in times to come. In simpler terms, ethical hacking is a preventive measure to strengthen a program so unethical hackers can’t break in and disrupt the program.

Good Hackers and Bad Hackers

The major difference between an ethical/good hacker and an unethical or bad hacker is ‘intent’. Ethical hackers are usually hired by tech companies to test the IT program and associated software and evaluate them against given standards. Ethical hackers have been known to contribute to IT security a lot this way. Talented professionals have been an asset or rather a backbone to the premise of cybersecurity across the world.

Contrarily, unethical hackers break into the system with the malicious intent of harming the program. While ethical hacking is legal in the books, unethical hacking is against the law. Unethical hackers are by far functioning illegally for all their immoral endeavors until they are caught and brought to justice

Taking down a site is different from hacking the site

Do you remember the chaos when the networks of Playstation and Xbox live were taken down? It was a publicity stunt pulled by a group of unethical hackers who identified themselves as ‘Lizard squad’. Taking down a site is far different from the hacking of the site. In technical terms, taking down a website means a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. To execute this attack, one needs to hack in the network of computers and send data packets towards one server in order to overload it. The host target is not infiltrated but is overloaded resulting in a denial of services. Clearly, overloading a site or server is a completely different chapter from infiltrating and ransacking the databases of the company.

Hacking in the form of social engineering doesn’t take skill or high-tech software

Yes, it’s true. One doesn’t need to be a computer wizard to break into your social media account. It is all a matter of poor security bars and people sharing personal information over social media channels too often. Understand this, it is very easy to learn about the answers to the security questions like your mother’s maiden name, your elementary school, your favorite pet and such. Once the relevant information is at hand, the rest is a child’s play. It doesn’t take a lot of skills to compromise your social media account, just a little social engineering will serve the purpose. Given the humans are the weakest part of any system and the softest target

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