What is Ethical Hacking?
Hacking to me is a skill that every computer user must be aware of. Well, by being aware, I mean of the security measures that must be taken while we are on a public network or in other words, on internet.
Being specific, few decades back, when the word ‘hacking’ was not evolved into the true sense of crime, it was meant to quote computer geeks who generally never meant to cause any harm. As years went on, the word has evolved into a new meaning, i.e., cyber crime. Therefore, a new phrase has come to existence to define the actual meaning of hacking and that is ‘Ethical Hacking’.
Who is a hacker anyway?
A person who performs hacking is known to be a hacker. Now a days, due to sophistication of advanced tools such as Metasploit everybody is or can be a hacker.
Types of hackers
Basically, hackers are classified into four types:
White Hat: Computer professionals trained or possessed with hacking skills who use their skills in a defensive way fall under this category of hackers.
Black Hat: Computer professionals with extraordinary computing skills wanting to cause harm or damage to a system come under Black Hat and are also known as crackers.
Gray Hat: These are the individuals who work in both offensive and defensive way depending on the requirement at various times.
Script Kiddies: Non-professional individuals who are basically beginners and are not trained fall in this category. These kind of hackers mostly rely on hacking tools are considered negligible in the hacker community.
Different phases of hacking (Hacking Methodologies)
Hacking is divided into five important phases. They are:
Reconnaissance or Information Gathering: In this phase the attacker is supposed to collect all the possible information available about the victim or target before he attacks and without the target’s awareness. A legitimate attacker spends approximately 90% of his attack time on reconnaissance. This is generally a preparatory phase where the attacker seeks to gather information about the victim prior to launching an attack.
Basically, there are two types of reconnaissance. One is passive and another one is active.
Active reconnaissance: This includes extracting or gathering information about the victim without direct interaction with the target or victim i.e., through Google, social media sites and press releases.
Passive reconnaissance: This type reconnaissance involves a direct interaction with the victim i.e., through telephone or other means.
Scanning: This refers to the pre-attack phase where the attacker actually starts interacting with the system by looking for open ports and daemons on live systems in the network. A typical attacker uses this phase for enumeration and for finding vulnerabilities in the system on the basis of information gathered during the reconnaissance phase. This phase includes use of port scanners, network mappers, vulnerability scanners etc. The attacker extracts the information such as computer names, IP addresses, user accounts prior to launching attack.
Gaining Access: This is exactly where the real hacking begins. Once the attacker is done pointing the loopholes in the system he goes ahead into the exploitation process and that is what known to be gaining access. Here, the attacker tries all the possibilities to bypass the security and leverage into the system. The attacker tries to escalate the privileges on the victim’s machine to obtain the complete control of the system.
Maintaining Access: So now that the attacker has got the access into the system he has to retain his access for future. That is because the vulnerability may be patched up and hence in this phase the attacker plants Backdoors or a Trojans or Rootkits for future access into the system. Further, the attacker may even secure the system to avoid being owned by other attackers. Attacker may also use the compromised system to launch further attacks.
Clearing Tracks: This phase is the most important phase that every attacker must take care of. That is deleting the system logs or also known as clearing tracks. Nobody wants to get behind bars therefore this is the phase where an attacker wipes off his evidence on the target machine to avoid being prosecuted.
Skills of an Ethical Hacker:
Network Expert: An ethical hacker must have a sound knowledge in networking and should be in a position to understand the network terminologies.
Computer Geek: He is also expected to be well worse in basic computing stuff such as understanding the computer jargons and must have a strong grasp on the practical understanding over the latest and updated systems.
Platform Knowledge: A hacker should be able to mage his tasks on cross platform manner. That is he must have experience to work on different operating systems.
Security Expert: Good defense is obviously what is expected from an ethical hacker. An ethical hacker needs to be an information security expert and more importantly he should also be good at pointing gaping holes in the system.
Technical Knowledge: Typically, this is the foundation for any hacker, because an ethical hacker will only be able to pen-test applications when he is able to understand the inner workings of the software.
That’s all for this tutorial, in the next article we’ll look at the terms that will be commonly used across this field and also in this series. Hence that would be quite important for beginners to survive in the hacker’s community.
If you are looking for a video tutorial to better understand this article in a much better way then kindly watch this video embedded below.
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