Vulnerability Assessments

ALSO CALLED: Network Vulnerability Assessment, Network Vulnerability, Security Vulnerabilities, Network Security Vulnerabilities, Vulnerabilities, Host Vulnerability Assessment, and Internet Security Vulnerabilities
DEFINITION: An ethical hacker is a computer and network expert who attacks a security system on behalf of its owners, seeking vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit. To test a security system, ethical hackers use the same methods as their less principled counterparts, but report problems instead of taking advantage of them. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing  … 
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VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS DEFINITION (continued): …  and red teaming. An ethical hacker is sometimes called a white hat, a term that comes from old Western movies, where the "good guy" wore a white hat and the "bad guy" wore a black hat. One of the first examples of ethical hackers at work was in the 1970s, when the United States government used groups of experts called red teams to hack its own computer systems. According to Ed Skoudis, Vice President of Security Strategy for Predictive Systems' Global Integrity consulting practice, ethical hacking has continued to grow in an otherwise lackluster IT industry, and is becoming increasingly common … 
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