Generally, a software or hardware vendor achieves greater profitability by hiring ethical hackers, versus being subjected to other types of vulnerabilities and exploitations.

Ethical hackers evaluate systems using a number of methods, some of which include:

• Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: These are usually applied by flooding a system with requests, rendering it unable to handle additional requests, which halts service to other users or results in system overflow and/or shutdown.
• Social Engineering tactics: Akin to simple fraud, these include any act that manipulates a user into divulging information or performing specific actions.
• Security scanners: Used to discover vulnerabilities, security scanners are exploitation tools designed to discover vunerabilities in networks.