Ethical Hacking, is a topic that could interest everyone, even more interesting is the choice of people with an expertise in it to keep it under wraps. Meanwhile Cyberdome Kerala Police’s new high-tech cyber security centre at Tejaswini building in Technopark, a project run as a public-private partnership – involving the state government and individual and corporate stakeholders – to tackle spiralling internet crime, has opened the doors to ethical hackers and ethical hacking.
Ethical hacking is a process of assessing the security of computer systems to find any vulnerability, with the ultimate goal of preventing data theft and fraud. Technopark, by virtue of it being the state’s IT headquarters, naturally, has quite a number of ethical hackers.
“There’s nothing wrong with it. An ethical hacker is essentially a good programmer; one who has in depth knowledge of the operating system, network and internet protocols and the hardware itself, enough to find their loopholes, strengths and weaknesses. What makes a hacker an ethical one is that he/she must well-intentioned, letting the authorities or those concerned know about what they have discovered in the process. There’s a fine line between good and evil in the cyber world and you must know where to draw the line,” explains the Techie Renjith Ramachandran senior software engineer at an MNC, who says he regularly goes head to head with black hats from places like Kazakhstan and Bulgaria as part of his job as server administrator.
The dearth of certified Ethical Hackers make it an extremely lucrative profession, but experts believe that it is a tough skill that is best practiced from the young age.
Renjith is also pleased to have Cyberdome operating in the campus, he feels that there are various benefits techies could draw from it and adds “The collective intelligence regarding networking and cyber security in hand on campus is among the best in the country, if not the world. Also, the IT pool here has experts and companies with diverse skill sets, from niche programmers and ethical hackers to cyber forensic experts to those with knowledge on cyber laws. And the best part of it is that all these resources are all only a call away, when needs be”
