When ever we hear the word ‘hacking’ lot many assumptions come to our mind. Most of the times the assumptions will be based on a negative understanding of hacking and they are usually stereo typed. We often relate hacker to young males who sits in the front of the computer at their home and do all kind of mischief online. It is of course partly true and partly wrong as it is not the complete representation of the hacker world.

Hackers usually consist of many members from around the world who form a team, and not all are involved in criminal activities. Today there are hackers who engage in criminal activities such as stealing credit card PIN codes, personal information, private data, and software. Such hackers are usually called by the name black hat hackers. On the other hand there are hackers who work within the law in order to prevent cyber crime. Such hackers are called by the name white hat hackers.

White hat hackers are usually employed by business corporations, governments, educational institutions to prevent their data from cyber attack. Such ethical hacking is becoming popular in today’s digital world.

What is ethical hacking?

Ethical hackers or white hat hackers usually come from a professional background and are computer engineers and scientists. The main role of ethical hackers is to prevent the computer network from being hacked. They should have a deeper understanding of how to detect security breach, and how to employ defense mechanisms against such kind of breaches. In short they should be equipped to predict the behavior of the black hat hackers.

Ethical hackers are also called by the name “penetration hackers”. In most of the cases ethical hackers start their career as a black hat hacker and then become white hat hackers as they understand that ethical hacking help them to earn more. So they join business corporations or government organizations.

How to become an ethical hacker?

For a person to become an ethical hacker, a computer engineering degree is highly appreciated. As most of the business networks run on UNIX and NT operating systems, a hacker should have deep knowledge of the same. This is a requisite as in many cases the white hat hacker has to go deep into many levels of the OS in order to find out deleted files and to obtain evidence about computer attacks. White hat hackers should have deeper understanding of networking and routing to prevent crimes related to emails.