Tag Archive for: ethical

‘Ethical’ hacker tries to stay a step ahead of the bad guys

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The internet is a tough neighborhood and Nikolas Behar is a hacker. He’s among the many who show up every year at DEFCON in Las Vegas, the hacker convention. But Niko, as everyone calls him, insists he’s on the right side of the firewall.

He considers himself an ethical hacker, and he works for groups that need protection from criminal hackers trying to break into their vaults of valued passwords and data.

“A lot of people, when they think about hackers, they think about people in hoodies,” Behar said. “But there’s a movement in the industry that’s trying to change that narrative and show that hackers aren’t necessarily bad.”

As an ethical hacker, Behar has to think like a criminal. When he works for a client, he tries to break into their system to spot vulnerabilities. One example, he was able to hack into the system of a hospital client.

“So what I was able to do was park across the street in my rental car with a special antenna. And I was able to connect to their Wi-Fi and communicate with a heart monitor on their network from across the street,” he said. “All because they didn’t configure their Wi-Fi correctly and it was leaking outside the building.”

Another time when he was working for a hedge fund, he got into their building after hours and jumped over a cubicle wall to find two unlocked computers.

“So we demonstrated that we would have been able to make a $5 million trade without anybody really noticing because there’s a cubicle that’s supposed to be secure and the wall of the cubicle doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. And the stuff in the cubicle is not locked or encrypted.”

So, who exactly are the unethical hackers? Sometimes, they work for national governments that want to pose a security threat to the U.S. Sometimes, they’re just looking for money, and that’s why they target people like us and your personal information.

“First name. Last name. Social security. Date of birth. And then you take all that data and you can sell in bulk to the highest bidder,” said Christian Dehoyos, a cybersecurity architect who leads San Diego’s chapter of the group the Open Worldwide Application Security…

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Temsconsu Issues Ethical Hacking Challenge With US$10,000 Reward For Cracking The Security Of Its Excelitte System

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Australia-based software engineering firm Temsconsu, the makers of the Excelitte file encryption and database security system, has issued a challenge for ethical hackers and IT experts to crack the security of its Excelitte system and find a hidden line of text. The first person to successfully find this text and notify Temsconsu about it will receive a prize of US$10,000.

The 72-character line of text, composed of letters and numbers, is hidden in either an Excelitte-encrypted file or in the Excelitte database. The person who can retrieve the text and send it to Excelitte’s designated email will receive the US$10,000 prize transferred to their bank account or bitcoin wallet. They also need to answer a simple question, as well as provide details such as the device name, file location, or database type, to prove that they have accessed the secret text.

Temconsu Challenge information

Aside from the US$10,000 reward, Temsconsu will offer an employment opportunity, provided that the successful individual is not part of any criminal watchlist.

“The US$10,000 prize and job offer shows how confident we are in Excelitte’s security,” says Valentine Wats, founder of Temsconsu. “We’ve made it very hard for anyone to expose the data we’ve hidden, but, in the unlikely event someone does, we would like to work with them because that means they know something that we don’t. Every week, we look at everything that happens in the field of cybersecurity, such as hacking incidents and data breaches, and see how we can counter these attacks. We go into the dark web to study how hackers operate from an ethical point of view and reverse-engineer their methods to ensure that Excelitte’s security is watertight.”

According to Wats, the challenge demonstrates the importance of cybersecurity in today’s environment, especially since many large public and private sector organizations have digitized their data and stored it in on the cloud or on devices connected to the internet. Cyber theft and other cybercrimes have been rapidly rising in recent years, with major hacking incidents hitting the news headlines every few weeks. This does not include the thousands of smaller incidents that do not gain media…

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Udupi: Workshop on ‘Cyber Security & Ethical Hacking’ held at SMVITM

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Media Release

Udupi, Sep 19: The Department of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Engineering, Department of Computer Science Engineering, ISTE & IEEE student chapters of SMVITM, in association with the National Information and Cyber Security Council (NICC) organized a two days workshop on “Cyber Security and Ethical Hacking” on September 15 and 16 in the institute premises.

Prameel Arjun, CEO, Prikus Group & Head, Research and Operations, National Information and Cyber Security Council (NICC) was the chief guest. He inaugurated the programme by lighting the lamp. In his Inaugural address to the gathering, he urged that the students must be equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to understand and protect against cyber threats, and to explore the ethical dimension of hacking. Also he said that practical skills were needed to secure digital assets and protect against cyber threats effectively.

Dr Thirumaleshwara Bhat, principal, in his presidential address, expressed his gratitude to the team from National Information and Cyber Security Council (NICC) for imparting such workshop for the benefit of students and urged the participants to gain maximum benefits.

Earlier, Nagaraja Rao, in-charge head, Department. of AI & DS and AI & ML Engineering welcomed the gathering and gave insights about the wokshop, importance of conducting such workshops for the benefit of the students.

Hithashree, 2nd year Data Science, invoked the blessings from the Almighty. Chandana of final year CSE, compered the programme. Dr Sowmya J Bhat, head, Department of CSE proposed a vote of thanks.

A total of 240 students participated in the workshop.

 

 

  

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Is Ethical Hacking Legal or Illegal?

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Spread the loveAs the world becomes increasingly reliant on technology, the risk of cyberattacks also rises. To combat this, many companies and organizations are turning to ethical hackers to test …

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