Hackers: An Exclusive Look Into the Profession 3 “White Hat”

This series has already explained the term “White hat” shortly in the first instalment. So here, we go in-depth from a short story of white hats at work to the present-day notable white hats.  

Early Use of White Hats.

The United States Air Force was one of the early organizations to make use of ethical hacking. They coined it “security evaluation”. Then the white hats conducted their tests under an approach of authenticity. They used easy data collection methods and direct attack techniques which resulted in findings. 

Some Tactics Used by White Hats.

A full-blown ethical hack include:

1. Comprise of emailing staff to ask for password details.
2. Searching through the official’s dustbins.
3. Breaking and entering without the knowledge and permission of the targets.  

Only the higher-ups who asked for such a security review of this magnitude are aware. To try to duplicate some of the fatal methods, a real attack will happen. The white hat may organize a hack late at night while the systems are less critical.  

As said before, companies hire white hats/ethical hackers to infiltrate their organizational information system. Then, if the condition requires, white hats may trail their marks.

Some white hats may trail their marks if the condition requires that. They use techniques to correct security problems. They also improve the overall cybersecurity defences. Some of the time it takes weeks to finish their assessments.  

The above statement depends on the size of the organization. Some of the attacks are listed below.

1. DoS & DDoS Attacks.
2. Social Engineering.
3. Reverse engineering.
4. Memory Dumping and Forensics.
5. Vulnerability Search, Research and Exploitation.
6. Scanning.
7. Frameworks Usage.

Notable White Hats 

Below are some of the notable white hats around:

1. Tim Berners-Lee.
2. Greg Hoglund.
3. Richard M. Stallman.
4. Dan Kaminsky.
5. Jeff Moss.
6. Charlie Miller.
7. Kevin Mitnick.
8. Tsutomu Shimomura.
9. Marc Maiffret.

At least one of the above list are former black hats.

To summarize, from white hats to black hats, they use almost the same techniques. White hats pretend to be black hats when on the job so the techniques, in general, will be the same but the methods are different.

Stay tuned for another article, au revoir!