Nowadays, when you hear the word “Hack” or “Hacker” a sheer terror runs through your mind. People are terrified over these terms. What is hacking? Are they all bad? Most of the laypeople who are not very familiar with the IT world, are clueless when it comes to the territory of Hacking. Little that they know, there are white knights in shining armour that fights and protect who cannot defend themselves from bad guys.
Most of us think hackers immerged only after the computer era has begun. In truth hackers have been in existence little over 100 years. Just two years after the telephone was invented (1870s by Alexander Grahambell), a group of boys were sacked from their jobs where they were hired to operate telephone switchboards. More than their intended work, these teenagers were interested on finding how the system works. In a nutshell they had got caught by trying to hack the system (1) .
In the beginning, computers were not like what we use to see today. Back in the day people didn’t have personal computers or laptops like we do today. Big companies and educational institutes such as universities used mainframe computers. These were very expensive huge machines which were locked in temperature controlled glass rooms. Even the maintenance cost was high. Therefore, programmers who used these mainframe computers had to share and had to fight to book a time to use it. Due to these problems the programing community searched for way to do their assigned work quickly and more efficiently (1).
In early 60s at MIT’s best and brightest of programmers invented some shortcuts which they called “Hacks”, sets of modifications to the OS of the mainframe computers or applications which allowed them to finish their work faster. Thus, words such as “Hack” or “Hacker” were coined. So when we look back at the concept of computer hacking, it was there with us almost as long as the computer (1).
Under the topic “Critique the employment of ethical hacking as a way of reviewing and strengthening the security of information systems,” This paper will be discussing mainly about Ethical hacking and why we need it. To build a platform, this paper would start by introducing what is an information system and importance of the same and continue to discuss about the security part of it. Mainly what is information security and why we need it. Then the focus of the paper would divert to the main topic by stating what is hacking and what is the difference between Black hat hacking and Ethical hacking. More importantly, the need of ethical hacking in order to strengthening the security of information systems will be discussed in this paper.
To get a broad idea about this topic, one has to have a basic idea of what an information system is, and what is meant by information security. Information system is a piece of software which is an integrated set of components, which work to store collect and process raw data to derive meaningful information and knowledge(2). In laypersons terms, in an organisation, there are a large amount of raw data to work with. Often, people think these raw data is equal to information. But in reality, when raw data is organised; sorted and categorised in to meaningful data which allows organisations to solve problems and answer questions then the raw data becomes information(2). What an information system does is, it takes raw data and helps to organise and analyse information which in turn helps organisations to make decisions. Most of the time, this information is vital for the survival and/or growth of the company.
Therefore, information should be protected at all cost. According to the Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS), information security is, protecting data and information including hardware and systems that use and store and transmit information(3). CNSS further elaborate security by introducing a security module named C.I.A. triangle. The security of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability is paramount to an organisation in order to safeguard organisational information. In this volatile environment, even C.I.A. triangle model is not enough to safeguard information. Hence, organizations need to take preventive measures to safeguard their information systems by exploiting the weaknesses in their current systems through employing ethical hacking.
Ethical hacking is simply hacking just like
every other hack but with a pure intent of exploiting loopholes and week points
to identify and take preventive measures to make them strong. Most importantly,
obtaining a prior approval from the target or the organisation to be hacked or
probed. In IT word they are named as White Hat hackers or Red Hat hackers,
while the bad guys are being labelled as Black Hat Hackers.
Works Cited
| 1. | Devitt M. A brief history of computer hacking. Dynamic Chiropractic. 2001; 19(13): p. 22. |
| 2. | Zandbergen P. What Are Information Systems? – Definition & Types. [Online]. 2019 [cited 2019 04 18. Available from: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-are-information-systems-definition-types-quiz.html#transcriptHeader. |
| 3. | Whitman ME, Mattord HJ. Principles of information security: Cengage Learning; 2011. |
By: Isuru Wickramaratne Email: isruk911@gmail.com
