White Hat Hacker

White hat hackers are those who hack with permission, authorization from a customer and seek to discover security vulnerabilities in a target system with the intent of mitigating those vulnerabilities. The white hat hackers may be employees of the target organization or third parties hired to conduct penetration testing.

A white hat hacker or ethical hacker is a professional who employs hacking skills and tools to identify security vulnerabilities in software, networks and hardware. The white hat hackers act with a sense of professionalism and respect the rules of engagement reached with a client as it applies to the hacking process. Moreover, the white hat hackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities only when they are given permission by their client to conduct the hacking activities. This is what mainly differentiates white hat hackers from their black hat counter parts.

Unlike the black hat hackers, the white hat hackers disclose and report all the vulnerabilities and exploitations that they find and penetrate during the hacking period to the responsible party. Furthermore, the white hat hackers use the same hacking techniques and tools as black hat hackers. However, the white hat hacker attacks target organization with an intention of helping the organization improve its security arsenals and posture.

The ethical hackers conduct one or more of the following techniques to identify vulnerabilities and exploit them:

• Penetration testing
• Social engineering
• Phishing attacks
• Denial-of-service (DoS)
• Security scanning
• More

However, the sole purpose of these attacks is to identify, exploit, and report vulnerabilities before the black hat hackers find it out. Moreover, as opposed to the black hat hackers, the white hat hackers prepare detailed report and propose recommendations to fix the vulnerabilities.