{"id":8259,"date":"2012-05-21T09:07:55","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T09:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/ethical-hacker\/"},"modified":"2012-05-21T09:07:55","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T09:07:55","slug":"ethical-hacker","status":"publish","type":"definition","link":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker","title":{"rendered":"Ethical Hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span id=\"what_does_ethical_hacker_mean\">What Does Ethical Hacker Mean?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p>An ethical hacker is an individual hired to hack into a system to identify and repair potential vulnerabilities, effectively preventing exploitation by malicious hackers. They are security experts that specialize in the penetration testing (pen-testing) of computer and software systems for the purpose of evaluating, strengthening and improving security.<\/p>\n<p>An ethical hacker is also known as a white hat hacker, red team, tiger team or sneaker.<\/p>\n<h2><span id=\"techopedia_explains_ethical_hacker\">Techopedia Explains Ethical Hacker<\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Generally, a software or hardware vendor achieves greater profitability by hiring ethical hackers, versus being subjected to other types of vulnerabilities and exploitations.<\/p>\n<p>Ethical hackers evaluate systems using a number of methods, some of which include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: These are usually applied by flooding a system with requests, rendering it unable to handle additional requests, which halts service to other users or results in system overflow and\/or shutdown.<\/li>\n<li>Social Engineering tactics: Akin to simple fraud, these include any act that manipulates a user into divulging information or performing specific actions.<\/li>\n<li>Security scanners: Used to discover vulnerabilities, security scanners are exploitation tools designed to discover vunerabilities in networks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Does Ethical Hacker Mean? An ethical hacker is an individual hired to hack into a system to identify and repair potential vulnerabilities, effectively preventing exploitation by malicious hackers. They are security experts that specialize in the penetration testing (pen-testing) of computer and software systems for the purpose of evaluating, strengthening and improving security. An [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"definitioncat":[255,218,247],"class_list":["post-8259","definition","type-definition","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","definitioncat-cyber-threats","definitioncat-cybersecurity","definitioncat-it-careers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.2 (Yoast SEO v24.5) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What is an Ethical Hacker? - Definition from Techopedia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This definition explains the meaning of Ethical Hacker and why it matters.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ethical Hacker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This definition explains the meaning of Ethical Hacker and why it matters.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Techopedia\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/techopedia\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@techopedia\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Margaret Rouse\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/#\/schema\/person\/f5dd538e31ee352d105b8af36c4268a5\"},\"headline\":\"Ethical Hacker\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-05-21T09:07:55+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker\"},\"wordCount\":188,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/#organization\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker#respond\"]}],\"articleSection\":\"\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/definition\/16089\/ethical-hacker\",\"name\":\"What is an Ethical Hacker? 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