White hat or ethical hackers are needed by many businesses to counter security threats.
Hackers are typically seen as criminals that use their tech skills to break into companies’ computer systems and steal information, money, or customer data. In most cases, hacking is extremely unethical and involves committing crimes that hurt others.
What Is Ethical Hacking?
It can be difficult to understand how hacking can ever be ethical, but some IT professionals decide to become hackers that use their skills to benefit companies rather than hurt them. Increasingly, companies are looking to hire these “white hat” hackers to help their cybersecurity team identify and counter cyber threats.
Ethical hackers aim to develop the same skills as malicious and criminal hackers—but only because they need to know all the devious and criminal methods hackers use for their harmful activities. One of the best ways to combat and counter hacking attempts is to have someone on your team who knows the methods of attack that hackers will use and how to prevent them. This is what ethical hackers do.
Certification helps demonstrate that ethical hackers have the skills needed to protect against hacking attempts.
How Do You Become an Ethical Hacker?
Many ethical hackers get started by learning hacking skills informally or on their own, then adding to those skills in order to use them to help businesses and organizations. Others need to learn through coursework how to become one.
No matter how you learn to be an ethical hacker, you will learn about security threats, attack vectors, and hacking methodologies that hackers may use against companies as well as what to do to prevent them or protect the company against them.
It is not always easy to demonstrate ethical hacking skills to an employer. Not only don’t most employers understand cybersecurity in depth, but you can’t exactly expect companies to give you access to their secure systems when you aren’t yet an employee.
This is where having an ethical hacking certification is helpful because the certification means that you have passed an exam and demonstrated that you can apply ethical hacking skills in a variety of real-world situations. Having the ethical hacking certification will put employers’ minds at ease about your ability to defend against security threats.
Continuing Education
A white hat hacker’s education can never be finished because criminal hackers are coming up with new ways to break into companies’ systems and exploit vulnerabilities. The certification for ethical hacking must be renewed every three years, and considerable effort will be required to maintain and update your skills in order to be effective at countering new hacking methods.
PC AGE offers Certified Ethical Hacker training courses to prepare students to earn the certification and become an ethical hacker for a company that needs help to fight against security threats. Request info about all the courses we offer to learn IT skills and prepare for the newest jobs in IT.