Question

Awesome depiction of how to mitigate an attack on privacy and credit card information. Our text discusses attacking your own network. Many firms hire outside consulting firms to do just that.

Why hire outsiders to play a hacker and test our network?

What are the benefits and risks?

NMap 101: Fun With Firewalls! HakTip 102 (Links to an external site.) NMap 101: Fun With Firewalls! HakTip 102
Please respond in text format, no pictures or hand written. Also any reference sites thank you!

Answer 1

Outsiders are hired to play a hacker and test our network to check if our network is strong and secured enough or not. These types of hackers are called as ethical hackers or White Hat Hackers. They hack into the network but unlike unethical hackers they dont steal any information from the system or intend any kind of of harm to his/her empolyer. They learn and perform hacking in a professional manner, based on the direction of the client, and later, present a maturity scorecard highlighting their overall risk and vulnerabilities and suggestions to improve This kind of hacking is always important for every organisation's network else they will never know if their network is secure enough.

Benefits of this :

• Discovering vulnerabilities from an attacker’s POV so that weak points can be fixed.
• Implementing a secure network that prevents security breaches.
• Helping protect networks with real-world assessments.
• It also reveals various ways through which a hacker can get into your system.
• Through this one can check his/her ability to deal if such breaches occur.
• Reveals Problems in Your Current IT Spending.
• Builds Trust with Your Customers.

Risks involved in this :

• System malfucntioning because of the testing
• System crash possibilities if it cant hold the testing pressure.
• Possibility of data loss.
• Trust on the hired ethical hacker that he/she does do something unethical.