Study on Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing

Abstract

Ethical hacking refers to the act of tracing weaknesses and vulnerabilities of computer and information systems by duplicating the intent and actions of malicious hackers. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing, or red teaming. Hacking is an activity in which, a person exploits the weakness in a system for self-profit or enjoyment. As public and private organizations migrate more of their critical functions or applications such as electronic commerce, marketing and database access to the Internet, then hackers have more opportunity and incentive to gain access to sensitive information through the Web application. Thus the need of protecting the systems from the hacking generated by the hackers is to promote the persons who will punch back the illegal attacks on our computer systems. Ethical hacking is an identical activity which aims to find and rectify the weakness and vulnerabilities in a system. Ethical hacking describes the process of hacking a network in an ethical way, therefore with good intentions. This paper describes what is ethical hacking, what are the types of ethical hacking, impact of Hacking on Businesses and Governments and penetration testing used for protection form hackers .