Every headline-grabbing cyberattack unveils new sophisticated hacking techniques, but the attacker’s portrait remains the same: a modern-day professional with a strong sense of curiosity, patience, and social skills that thoroughly examines a company’s systems, takes note of every vulnerability, then uses it as a weapon to trick his way into a business’ IT system. Powered by their hunger for knowledge, the many skillful individuals in today’s hacker communities are the ideal example of how to further minimize cyber risk. How? Just try being as curious about your company’s vulnerabilities—observe, identify the weak spots, and then protect your organization with precision. In other words, turn to ethical hacking.
Discover below why it’s time to cultivate the hacker mindset inside your enterprise and gain the upper hand in the cybersecurity battle.
What Is Ethical Hacking?
Hackers might have a bad reputation, but not all of them are a danger to your organization. Contrary to public belief, there are hackers who will help you find the security flaws in your IT environments before someone else can use them against you. This activity, also known as penetration testing, is performed by ethical hackers. With your permission, these professionals will use the same technologies, techniques, and tactics as malicious attackers to break into your systems, except they won’t do it for the wrong reasons.
These security experts will legally seek the entry point into your infrastructure. Once in, they aim to exploit your systems, applications, devices, or networks in order to:
- Gauge the effectiveness of your security controls
- Find the vulnerabilities specific to your own systems
- Predict which security flaws could be exploited
- Identify the best strategy to address a security hole
- Remove all the vulnerabilities and ensure safety
And they won’t stop here. Ethical hackers will also identify non-technical threats, like social engineering—perhaps the most difficult type of cyber attack to thwart these days. The cybercriminals behind these attacks look to psychologically manipulate individuals to divulge confidential information or to break the security procedures. Since people are viewed as the weakest link in the security chain, threat actors don’t focus on a business’ technical defenses any longer; instead, they are increasingly shifting their attention on humans. To discover how susceptible your organization might be to social engineering threats, ethical hackers will run simulated attacks. Just like their malicious counterparts, these professionals will try to gain the trust of your employees and influence the victims to provide sensitive business data or perform another action that puts your business at risk. Such assessments provide visibility into user behavior and will help you discover if you should develop a more vigilant defense strategy to block these threats.
Why Do You Need to Hack Your Own Systems?
There’s no better way to stop attackers at the front door than to continuously test and validate the effectiveness of your security program. When this validation comes from a hacker’s point of view, you will feel more confident about your overall security posture. Because these security experts understand the criminal hacker’s mentality, they will try to actively anticipate what your adversaries might do next—and you need this kind of expertise on your side to proactively protect your assets.
Instead of assuming that your cybersecurity is taken care of, ethical hackers will objectively assess your security architectures to help you get a real sense of how your current strategy is performing. By relying on their holistic analysis, one that includes a specific evaluation of your entire security culture, you will also be able to:
- Train your staff and build a more confident security team
- Adopt a better corporate cybersecurity mindset
- Keep up with new security threats as they emerge
- Take actionable steps to prioritize and adjust your security practices
- Zero in on your best-fit security tools
To outsmart today’s highly-motivated hacker, you must act exactly like this individual and see what others often overlook. With ethical hacking, you have the opportunity to go beyond the generic vulnerabilities that your security team knows all about—you will get a clear-eyed perspective on all the undisclosed threats that should be addressed immediately. In the long run, this procedure will not only harden your security systems against threats but also help you meet compliance requirements more efficiently.
Look Under the Hood to Advance Your Cybersecurity Efforts
In the blink of an eye, threat actors could use any type of data to bring a business to a standstill. As hackers become more sophisticated, technology can create a false feeling of safety. Even with the most innovative security solutions in place, attacks are now harder to track down—and that’s because hackers are already a few steps ahead of technology. After all, human touch continues to play an important role in security. When you rely on an experienced ethical hacker, you have the best of both worlds: the safety of your systems will be ensured by a professional that has a high level of technical proficiency and advanced security knowledge. This way, you will take all the necessary steps to keep hackers at bay—for good.
