We are used to seeing a lot of information related to cyber attacks by hackers. Many types of threats that can steal passwords, data, infect computers … Now, what about ethical hackers ? In this article we are going to talk about how they can help avoid certain security problems.
How Ethical Hackers Can Help
First of all we must mention what is ethical hacking . We can say that it is the action carried out by a computer security expert to search for vulnerabilities and failures that may exist in a system, device or any program. In this way it can alert you to possible threats that may arise.
Let’s take as an example that an ethical hacker tries to access a wireless network or execute commands to break the security of an application. It may be that in both cases there are certain vulnerabilities that are not known and that could allow the entry of intruders, of hackers in short. Therefore, the work that an ethical hacker does is to report on those detected flaws in order to launch patches and be able to correct them.
In what circumstances can ethical hackers help? We are going to see some examples in which they have been of great help to avoid greater evils that could compromise the users.
Vulnerability in Visa Contactless payment
One of the help that ethical hackers have given had to do with Contactless payment through a Visa card. This is something that is very common today. In fact, with the Covid-19 pandemic in Spain, they increased the maximum from € 20 to € 50 to be able to pay in this way and reduce physical contact by constantly having to enter the PIN.
Two security researchers, ultimately two ethical hackers, detected two major vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to steal unlimited money with one card. This allowed banks and customers to take precautions.
Attack on Canon camera
Another important vulnerability that was detected by ethical hackers was one that affected Canon cameras . The attack took advantage of a flaw that injected ransomware over Wi-Fi. Specifically it affected the 80D DSLR model.
Security researcher Itkin discovered a total of six vulnerabilities that could be used to sneak ransomware and lock down the victim’s device. As with these types of attacks, hackers may ask for a financial ransom to release files.
Vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins
In this case we can say that there have been many situations in which an ethical hacker has detected security flaws in WordPress plugins , the most important and used content manager worldwide.
However, one of those most important detected flaws occurred in 2019, when a security researcher found a vulnerability in a plugin called Social Network Tabs that could leak personal data of Twitter users.
Oracle Servers
They were also able to detect a critical vulnerability in Oracle’s WebLogic servers. Specifically, there were two failures that allowed an attacker to take full control of the system. This vulnerability was tracked as CVE-2019-2729.
Ultimately, these are some examples of how an ethical hacker can help detect and fix cybersecurity problems. They allow companies and developers to find these bugs and release patches to correct them. We leave you another article where we see the differences between security in the network and the cloud.