Ethical hacking by C. C. Palmer

The explosive growth of the Internet has brought many good things: electronic commerce, easy access to vast stores of reference material, collaborative computing, e-mail, and new avenues for advertising and information distribution, to name a few. As with most technological advances, there is also a dark side: criminal hackers. Governments, companies, and private citizens around the world are anxious to be a part of this revolution, but they are afraid that some hacker will break into their Web server and replace their logo with pornography, read their e-mail, steal their credit card number from an on-line shopping site, or implant software that will secretly transmit their organization’s secrets to the open Internet. With these concerns and others, the ethical hacker can help. This paper describes ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they go about helping their customers find and plug up security holes. The ethical hacking process is explained, along with many of the problems that the Global Security Analysis Lab has seen during its early years of ethical hacking for IBM clients.

scribe the rapid crafting of a new program or the making of changes to existing, usually complicated software. As computers became increasingly available at universities, user communities began to extend beyond researchers in engineering or computer science to other individuals who viewed the computer as a curiously flexible tool. Whether they programmed the computers to play games, draw pictures, or to help them with the more mundane aspects of their daily work, once computers were available for use, there was never a lack of individuals wanting to use them. Because of this increasing popularity of computers and their continued high cost, access to them was usually restricted. When refused access to the computers, some users would