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Ethical Hacker

Definition - What does Ethical Hacker mean?

An ethical hacker is an individual hired to hack into a system to identify and repair potential vulnerabilities, effectively preventing exploitation by malicious hackers. They are security experts that specialize in the penetration testing (pen-testing) of computer and software systems for the purpose of evaluating, strengthening and improving security.

An ethical hacker is also known as a white hat hacker, red team, tiger team or sneaker.

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Techopedia explains Ethical Hacker

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.
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