“Cyber forensics employs digital evidence from multiple areas such as deleted files or erased partitions on hard drives and other memory storage devices, reviewing log files from various devices like firewalls, intrusion prevention, as well as security events and information management (SEIM) tools”.
“Certain expressions can mean different things to different people. I think for many businesses you could bring this down to one of two things. It is either pre-emptive analysis of their environment, which many people do and is called penetration testing. This is basically going into an organisation and looking for weaknesses that could lead to some sort of security breach and that can be everything from the technical, to implementation and processes. Equally we could be called in after the fact as well to understand how and why things have been done, to help them understand how security is achieved and to make sure that it is not done again in the future”.
“Ethical hackers are traditionally security experts or analysts who perform penetration testing activities on the applications, systems and networks upon formal approval by the business. They are important elements of security as they provide the technology and the guidance required to proactively strengthen related elements before an external hacker exploits the same,” points out Baig.
The role of ethical hackers within an organisation is to constantly test the integrity of the systems to ensure that they are not prone to attacks. Much of this testing is done by simulating attacks and trying to get through the company’s defences, just like any true-blue hacker.
