Do you have this hat in white?

--Originally published at Don't Trust Humans, Trust Computers

hacker

Hackers!!!

Those vicious guys that are trying to break in into your computer and get all your personal information and sale it in the black market…well that’s what most of the people think when they hear the word “hacker”. But what if I tell you that the hacker isn’t the bad guy, and instead it is the hero that came to save the day. You may thing that I am talking nonsense; that ALL hacker are bad because that’s what you saw on tv or movies. But in reality not all hackers are bad (even tough there are bad hackers) and these hackers provide an HUGE amount of help to a company’s system. To those hackers that help companies check if there are threats in their systems or computers, we call them ethical hackers and to the action of doing this we call it ethical hacking.

Ethical hacking is a very important action that every company should go trough. It is important because thanks to that, companies can check the vulnerabilities that their systems have, and with that they can make changes to them. This concept of ethical hacking comes from the idea of “thinking like a thief”, to be one step ahead of those who will try to harm any system or computer. To those hacker that we consider bad, we call them black hat and to those we consider good we call them white hat.

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This white hackers do various test to check the vulnerability of the system, and this kind of tests are called penetration testing or intrusion testing. A penetration testing gives an scenario of how secure the system is and it shows things like: