How do you verify if your home is well protected from intruders or burglars? What you can do to protect your family?  Perhaps the best ways to assure your security are to check the windows, doors, skylights and other vulnerable parts of your house or to get a German Sheppard or you can put some PVC pipes in the tracks of the lower floor windows as well. If you are still unsure you might ask your best friend to attest your security system. If that is also not satisfying you can try another unconventional method of checking security loopholes. Challenge your friend to intrude into your house by breaking your home security arrangements. Now that makes sense. That would be a real time test of your safeguard. Ah, so lucky we are, we don’t have to do that much of arrangement for our home. But unfortunately Internet or the web is not that secure. There are some people or groups who want to steal your information, cause malicious damage or use your data for illegal purposes. We cannot deny the vulnerability in the security of Internet as 1.5 million website hacking cases registered in the year 2010. More than 295 Exabyte’s (one byte with 18 zeros behind it = 1 Exabyte) of compressed data been stored on internet by 2007. And this massive amount of data is not only stored by individuals, institute and organizations but by Government, Intelligence and Security Agencies. Thanks to the presence of IT security systems who constantly work to protect internet data by implementing methods like Firewalls, Secure Socket Later (SSL), One-way Hashing Algorithms, Transport Layer Security, Data Encryption Techniques etc. But these are only the basics of IT security, very much like protecting your home by checking doors, windows, locks, security alarm system. What extra measures can be taken to make internet safer? Let’s invite the best friend of Internet and dare him to intrude, just the same method we used for our home protection. Here the best friend is an Ethical Hacker. An Ethical Hacker is a good guy who hacks a system to discover vulnerabilities for the purpose of protecting computers against illicit entry, abuse, and misuse. This hacking act is for defensive purpose. Often companies hire Ethical Hackers to pen-test their network security arrangements. The demand of Ethical Hackers is rising rapidly. It’s a hacking practice on good purpose and for some it’s a fascinating career. Ethical hackers are also known as “white hat” hacker, or penetration tester or legal hackers. It is called ethical because hacking is carried out only if the software developing organization request for it.

There are a number of ways through which computer savvies can enter into this technical field. And there is no particular certification or degree available for it. Any regular computer engineer/ IT engineer (having degrees like MCA, B Tech (Computers), GNIIT, MIT, M.Sc. I.T) can become an ethical hacker if he/she has deep knowledge, skill and expertise about local area networks and internet connectivity procedure, networking, security etc. Other required skills are C, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Knowledge of assembly language is essential. An ethical hacker also should have a basic understanding of TCP/IP protocols such as SMTP, ICMP and HTTP.

Normally Organizations don’t create positions with a tag line or title with ‘Hacker’. Following job titles come under Ethical Hacking career.