What is Ethical Hacking?

When you hear the word “hacker” you often think of cyber criminals and bad guys with hoodies, or if you’re old enough the movie hackers. However, there is another bread of white hat “good guys” called ethical hackers. Ethical hacking is the practice of simulating an attack against an organisation and identifying cyber security weaknesses.

By taking the same approach, tools and methodologies that a criminal hacker would, it’s possible for ethical hackers to bypass system security measures and compromise corporate networks. Ethical hackers are also commonly referred to as “white hat hackers” help organisations identify security issues then explain how to fix the discovered issues, ethical hacking ultimately helps organisations improve their cyber security.

What is Ethical Hacking?

Ethical hackers commonly perform penetration testing to identify weak entry points into a network. In addition to discovering security issues and vulnerable software weaknesses, professional ethical hackers document findings, explain how to fix issues, and in some cases, provide consultancy on how to mitigate or perform remediation for cyber security threats. The work of a professional ethical hacker helps improve IT security policies, best practices and staff awareness to the cyber security issues that exist today.

How to become an Ethical Hacker

Ethical hacking ultimately requires the mindset of a hacker, the want to learn how things work, how things can be taken apart and finally, how things can be exploited to perform tasks that the original designer had not intended.

Professional Certifications

Industry level certifications can help show an employer you have what it takes to be a good ethical hacker. Certifications that offer hands on / practical elements such the OSCP, or the (CEH) credential prove you can perform ethical hacking against lab machines. In addition, they demonstrate a basic ability to document and report your findings in a professional capacity.

We hope this article has helped you understand more about ethical hacking, be sure to check out our other cyber security related articles.

Gaming Headset vs Headphones and Mic

Gaming Headsets vs Real Headphones

We all pride ourselves in a good pair of headphones. Whether you are on the go, relaxing at home or gaming, you deserve perfect sound quality to enjoy those hits or a conversation with a friend. However, such good quality comes at a price. So unless you are really good at shopping around in the market to get the best quality at the best price, you are in trouble. When it comes to gaming, just like an awesome movie experience, sound quality is paramount. With incorporation of an almost perfect environment sound in game design, you need headphones that can provide you with the perfect sound experience. Now you find yourself with a difficult task. Do you maintain our current headphones that do provide you with good music quality but you are not sure they will provide you with a good gaming experience or on the other hand, get some new gaming headsets that promise you with the ultimate gaming experience but you are a bit skeptical about.

To help out with this, we will take a good comparison of these two and hopefully help you with your decision. As expected, gaming headsets place a greater emphasis on specific aspects of gaming such as surround sound where you can feel the sound environment as you play. In this way, if different characters move within the game environment, in respect to your position, you are able you get a good sense of where they are located within the field of play. Most gaming headsets will therefore incorporate 7.1 surround sound technology to their headsets to help achieve this. However, the idea does not work out with nearly all gaming headsets and here is why;

• The technology uses different audio channels within the headsets to provide the directional feel when the headphones are in use. These channels are Front, center, side, rear and the subwoofer. The seamless operation of these different channels within the headsets ensures that the surround sound is achieved. As you will notice however, most gaming headsets if not all ,are terrible at this, giving you less quality surround sound quality and, therefore, reduce them to your usual headphones but in addition, loose some the more premium qualities you will get with real headphones.

The only other thing that can come in to give the gaming headphones a better feel is an open back design. Gaming headphones that have this design have proven to give a really good feel of the gaming environment but sadly, they tend to fall on the higher price range.

So in essence what we have nothing significant in reference to sound quality left to compare gaming headsets to real headsets. Apart from the sound quality, there is the immense work on design and comfort. Gaming headsets designers have gone out of their way to create large rugged designs that do not really add much to the consumers gaming experience; apart from the fact that they make a statement to that they are gaming headsets. Some designs have included creative lighting designs that maybe quite a distinguishing factor from your normal headphones. At the end of day however, all the lighting and exterior design do not really improve the consumer sound experience as compared to the real headphones.

The Most Secure Cloud Backup Providers

Secure Cloud Backup Providers

Are you worried about backing up you data on insecure sites that can be easily hacked leading to loss of your data or leaking of sensitive information about your personal life or business?

If you are, then you are just like most other people with secrets that need to be kept as such which constitutes all of us! Criminals and so called hacktivists will bend over backwards to exploit every shot they get to access your data locked away in insecure servers. While every system ever made has its own weaknesses that can be exploited to break into it and access the data without following due procedure, there are systems out there that are nearly hack proof. As you may well be aware, perhaps the weakest link even with a secure cloud backup provider, is likely the human user prone to errors. Such systems are not really hack proof but have been assessed by a consultant skilled in ethical hacking, to identify security that more obvious. Making the service more secure and presenting a larger challenge to hackers, hopefully to the point where it’s more trouble than it’s worth for malicious user to try and break in.

Here are some ways in which you can choose the most secure cloud backup providers

How to choose the most secure cloud backup services

• Personalized services
  Consider the ability of the service to suit your personal needs and those of your family or business associates.
• Consider cloud back up reviews
  Sifting through the most trusted consumer review of backup services will help quickly reveal the best services. Or at least the bad ones; if you are unsure if you can live a similar complaint as one posted by a previous customer ask yourself if it’s a chance you are willing to take.
• Up to date sites with latest encryption
  Sites that have a habit of always being at the front line with new cutting edge encryption technology for your data are far more secure than those that lag with updates. Its common sense. Remember the cyber security industry is a highly dynamic one.
• Avoid sync services
  This excludes Google drive, drop box and other sync backup services from your list. They may offer large free storage but they are not the most secure ones.
• Sites that offer much information on data encryption techniques

If a cloud backup service provider does not offer much information about how they go about encrypting your data, then perhaps they are not worth your business.

When you use this criteria to sort through the plethora of cloud backup services available on the web, you are left with only the crème de la crème of cloud backups. These include companies like Backblaze, Carbonite an MozyHome.

In short, how safe your data is online depends on a number of factors key among them how the data is scrambled using an encryption key and how difficult it is for someone other than those authorized by the system to recover the same key. There are various methods of data encryption and levels as evident above as well as the amount of control you have as a subscriber as far as data encryption goes.