Get Paid to Be a Hacker!

Have you ever thought getting paid to be a hacker? I said a “hacker” but it is an ethical hacker. Many people misunderstand the word “hacker”. Unlike cracker, a hacker is always ethical.

So what does an ethical hacker do? An Ethical hacker (or the white hat hacker) is a computer expert with great knowledge in computer and network security. He or she attacks on systems on behalf of the system owner to seek for vulnerabilities that a cracker could exploit. The activity carried by a hacker is called Ethical Hacking.

I had been working in a hospitality company as the quality management representative of R&D department. Hotel and casino businesses are their core businesses. Thus, I understand customers’ data is the company’s most important asset.

Customers’ data must be protected. Sensitive information likes password and credit card number must not be seen in any way or their account balance should not be altered in any way (neither in physical disk nor over the network). Any security breaches must trigger an alert to the system so that user can take further investigation on the security breaches.

I was  the assistant manager of a testing team in the company too. I must make sure the team members test the system changes properly before the new runtime is deployed to avoid any vulnerability in the system. My team members, most of them were just a normal programmer. It would be great if they could equip themselves with hacking knowledge and get certified as Ethical Hacker.

Certified Ethical Hacker does get high paid for the jobs in IT Security fields as well as other IT firms. Many big companies like Cisco and IBM are paying high salary to recruit more certified ethical hackers in order to secure their own and their clients’ IT assets.

The International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants (EC-Council), a member supported professional organization, provides various lives, online, instructor-led training classes (the iClass). The iClass is covering the following subjects: 

• Security Fundamentals 
• Ethical Hacking 
• Penetration Testing 
• Computer Forensics

• Disaster Recovery 
• Secure Programming

If you are interested to be a hacker, be sure to be the ethical one and not the bad one: cracker. If you are looking for new career in IT security, why not get an ethical hacker certification so that you are recognized and to get higher paid jobs?