INTRODUCTION

We have all either fallen victim to hackers, or at least personally know someone who has been a victim of credit card hacking. According to the American Bankers Association, 7 in 10 Americans have at least one credit card, which puts the number of active credit card accounts to roughly 176 million. All these serve as prime targets for hackers all around the world, with one of the more prominent cyber-attacks affecting Equifax that reportedly led to the exposure of 143 million accounts in the US alone.

I recently received a letter from my bank that highlighted 2 suspicious purchases, and a note asking me to sign off on not being responsible for making those purchases. Undoubtedly my credit card had been hacked, and that got me thinking of why companies need to ensure they employ ethical hackers in an effort to combat the rise of cyber-attacks. Additionally, the use of credit cards to make payments has steadily been on the rise over the past several years – a trend that is forecast to continue in the coming years.

TYPES OF HACKERS

There are 3 main categories of hackers:

1.      Black hat hacker

2.      Grey hat hacker

3.      White hat (Ethical) hacker

Black Hat Hacker – a person that illegally breaks into a network and steals data or causes harm to the network or other property.

Grey Hat Hacker – a person who exploits a network’s security to expose any vulnerabilities and bring them to the attention of those managing the networks. They could, in some cases, also use this for illegitimate activity.

White Hat Hacker (Ethical Hacker) – an information security professional who is employed by an organization to perform penetration testing/legally hack that same organization’s network or systems in order to check for security vulnerabilities and resolve them before hackers ultimately gain access to engage in fraudulent activity.

Ethical hackers play a crucial role in:

• Identifying and eliminating potential security threats
• Protecting an organization’s systems from hackers
• Ensuring the privacy of an organization’s data
• Decreasing the prevalence of cyber-attacks

Some of the threats that ethical hacking professionals aim to prevent include the following:

• Password attacks
• Phishing
• Distributed Denial of Service attacks
• Malware
• Rogue software
• Drive-by downloads

Credit card information is not the only data target for hackers. The increasing utilization of cloud services has placed a major emphasis on cloud service providers ensuring that they maintain strict levels of data security for their clients’ data. The table below shows the increasing revenue generated by some of the cloud service providers over a 5-year window between 2016 – 2020.

Organizations that house their data on-prem don’t necessarily have to employ a 3rd party to safeguard their data and may choose to implement proprietary data security protocols and procedures to protect their data from falling prey to hackers. However, some of these organizations may not be as adept at practicing the best data security protocols and may be better served employing ethical hackers.

CONCLUSION

Cloud computing has gained a lot of traction in recent years in the IT industry, which has consequently given rise to the threats of cyber-attacks for many organizations. Such organizations facing data migration from on-prem servers to cloud servers have a strong justification for employing ethical hackers in order to ensure that they stay ahead of hackers by identifying and closing security vulnerabilities in their computer networks.

You can reach out to me to discuss the possibilities of hiring ethical hackers for your organization, or to learn more about the importance of staying ahead of potential cybersecurity threats facing businesses worldwide. 

Published by

Fred Obiero