When you hear the word “hacker”, what kind of a person do you usually think of? Probably a bad actor, right? Well, there are different kinds of hackers (white, grey, black, blue, etc.) when it comes to security, but in this article, I will only focus on the good guys - who are also known as white hat hackers or ethical hackers (a commonly-used term today).
Table of Contents:
- What is a White Hat Hacker?
- What Does a White Hat Hacker Do?
- White Hat Hacking Techniques
- Benefits of White Hat Hacking
- Disadvantages of White Hat Hacking
- Final Thoughts: Why White Hat Hackers Are Important
What is a White Hat Hacker?
A white hat hacker, also known as an ethical hacker, is someone who chooses to use their powers for good rather than for evil. Their purpose is to search and exploit vulnerabilities within a system, network, or system infrastructure to determine whether unauthorized access is possible. The objective is to provide recommendations to mitigate these risks.
It is important to understand that the actions performed by white hat hackers are legal as they have permission from the organization to hack their systems. This is the biggest difference between a white hat hacker and a black hat hacker. Black hat hackers have malicious intentions with the goal of releasing malware and damaging an organization’s reputation.
What Does a White Hacker Do?
White hat hackers have many responsibilities including the following:
1. Find vulnerabilities
Ethical hackers help an organization determine which of its security measures are effective and which need improvements. Once the ethical hacker has finished evaluating the organization’s systems and infrastructure, they report back to the manager regarding the vulnerable aspects.
2. Help prepare for cyberattacks
The white hat hackers should understand the techniques that threat actors use to perform cyberattacks and stay ahead of the latest technologies.
3. Demonstrate techniques used by cybercriminals
These demonstrations are beneficial to show top executives what types of attacks and techniques hackers can use to damage an organization. By understanding how an attack works, they are able to know what additional security measures to implement to better secure an organization.
White Hat Hacking Techniques
White hat hackers generally use the same techniques as black hat hackers to attack an organization. Here are some of the hacking techniques:
- Security scanners such as Nessus and burp suite - this would be useful to identify open ports and what service is running on it
- DoS attacks
- Reverse Engineering
- Network security
- Social engineering
- Frameworks (i.e. metasploit)
Benefits of White Hat Hacking
White hat hackers are beneficial to an organization in many ways and below is a list of some of the benefits.
Identification of vulnerabilities
As I mentioned earlier, the main benefit of an ethical hacker is to exploit vulnerabilities on your system and network. The ethical hacker helps an organization determine how strong and secure their security implementation is and where the weak areas are.
Tightening of security
Makes sure that the organization has implemented an appropriate amount of security to be able to withstand cyberattacks performed by the hackers
Fewer downtimes
White hat hackers will help an organization experience less downtimes if a cyberattack were to occur. This is good for an organization because they won’t be losing a lot of money and customers would still be able to access your webpage and services as usual.
Test your company IT support team
Hacking your organization’s network will test the skills of your current IT support team. This information would be useful to managers to understand what kinds of training they should provide to their employees within the IT support team.
Disadvantages of White Hat Hacking
Limited time
White hat hackers have a limited amount of time to do their work and deliver their findings once they are hired to work.
Limited testing scope
Typically the white hat hacker is focused on infiltrating an environment or asset, but there are definitely more areas within an organization’s network that can be tested which are not covered by white hat hackers.
Final Thoughts: Why White Hat Hackers Are Important
White hat hackers are people we should be grateful for because they are the reason why we can improve our security from a mobile device to an organization’s infrastructure. With technology constantly evolving, the threats are also increasing therefore needing more security. As with organizations containing an immense amount of sensitive data, white hat hackers would be beneficial to help determine how to keep them more secure and prevent threats.
Let’s take a look at a real-world example. On October 18th, 2021, a group of white hat hackers was able to remotely jailbreak an iPhone Pro 13 just in 15 seconds. The vulnerabilities were disclosed in full detail to Apple so that they can release security patches for these vulnerabilities. Keep in mind that this new generation of the phone has only been out for less than a month and hackers have already found problems within it.
As you can see, cyberattacks still occur and without these good hackers, we would not be able to stay safe.