ETHICAL HACKING

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

e-mail, steal their credit card number

ABSTRACT:
The explosive growth of the Internet has brought many good things: electronic commerce, easy access to vast stores of reference material, collaborative computing, e-mail, and new avenues for advertising and information distribution. As with most technological advances, there is also a dark side- criminal hackers. Governments, companies, and private citizens around the world are anxious to be a part of this revolution, but they are afraid that some hacker will break into their Web server and replace their logo with pornography, read their

from an on-line shopping site, or implant software that will secretly transmit their organization's secrets to the open internet. With these concerns and others, the ethical hacker can help. This paper describes ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they go about helping their customers find and plug up security holes.

CONTENT:
INTRODUCTION ETHICAL HACKING

WHY-ETHICAL HACKING PENETRATION TESTING BENEFITS STEPS INVOLVED IN

When ethical is placed in front of the term hacking it denotes moral activity, Unethical hacking has no permission to intrude on systems. Ethical hacking includes permission to intrude such as contracted consulting services, hacking contests, and beta testing. If there is no permission to intrude, ethical hackers still find ad hoc ways to become aware of the system security of other systems. The end goal of ethical hackers is to learn system

PENETRATION TESTING ADVANTAGES CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION:
Unauthorized computer intrusions are considered illegal in all but the most desperate of circumstances. Once hacking ability is used to commit a crime the hacker becomes a criminal. Criminal hackers or crackers gain unauthorized access primarily to seek financial motivations systems, gain of but recently have to other been crackers damage

vulnerabilities so that they can be repaired for community self-interest - and as a side-product also the common good. Networked systems are dependent upon each other for system security so awareness of the security of machines within ones community-of-interest is not entirely altruistic but rather concerned with system security.

categorized such as seeking to subvert doing systems (vandalism), promoting political causes (hactivism), and acting as an agent of a foreign state (cyber terrorism and information warfare). The misapplication of the term cracker to a law-abiding hacker is due to celebrated incidents of unauthorized intrusions into computer systems that have incorrectly to been attributed to backers due to the extensive programmingskill success. needed achieve

HACKERS :
Hacker refers to a person who enjoys learning the details of computer capabilities. systems and stretch their

HACKING:
Hacking describes the rapid development of new programs or reverse engineering of already existing software to make the code better and efficient.

ETHICAL HACKING:

An ethical hacker is a computer and network expert who attacks a security system on behalf of its owners, seeking vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing and red teaming. An ethical hacker is sometimes called a white hat, a term that comes from old Western movies, where the "good guy" were a white hat and the "bad guy" were a black hat.

significantly slow down the system. Methods include: Flood a network. Bandwidth/Throughput attacks Protocol attacks. Software Vulnerability attacks. Disrupt connections between two machines. Prevent a particular individual from accessing a service.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING:
It is an art of using influence and persuasion to deceive people for the purpose of obtaining information or to perform some action. Even with all firewalls, authentication processes, VPN, companies are still wide open to attacks. Humans are the weakest link in the security chain. It is the hardest form of
Automated Attacks

WHY- ETHICAL HACKING:

Protection from possible external Attacks

Social Engineering Organizational Attacks

attack to defend against.

What does an ethical hacker do?

Restricted Data

An ethical hacker's evaluation of a system's security seeks answers to three

Denial of Service (DoS)

Accidental Breaches in Security

basic questions: 1. What can an intruder see on the target systems? 2. What can an intruder do with that information? 3. Does anyone at the target notice the intruder's attempts or successes?

Viruses, Trojan Horses, and Worms

Fig :1.Types of attacks.

DENIAL OF SERVICE:
An attack with which an attacker renders a system unusable or

While the first and second of these are clearly important, the third is even more important: If the owners or operators of the target systems do not notice when someone is trying to break in, the intruders can, and will, spend weeks or months trying and will usually eventually succeed.

given

on

fixing

vulnerabilities

and

minimizing the risk. A penetration test could focus exclusively on your web applications. This could be done at various levels

BLACK -BOX TESTING:

Here, we only know the URL of the website. Enumeration of technologies, mapping of the website, identification of fault injection points, determining input validation vulnerabilities, or logical security vulnerabilities,.

PENETRATION TESTING:

GREY-BOX

TESTING:
Often enough, a web

Fig 2:TESTING Penetration testing is a unique approach to solving network security problems. Without a security assessment such as this or a security audit it is impossible to implement testing adequate includes security measures. Penetration vulnerability check and analysis, together with emulating the threat that a would-be attacker takes.The service covers but not limited to network security security testing testing, and system wireless network security testing, web application inspection, authentication

application involves authentication and authorization components. In order to be able to test these, we request for a dummy user account with the least level of privileges within the application. Using this account, we are able to log in and test for various flaws in the authentication scheme, as well as attempt to escalate our privileges restrictions and bypass authorization

Why Penetration Testing?

Our service is suitable for companies of all sizes and includes: Ethical hackers with over 10 years experience

subversion. Recommendation will be

Advice measures

and

support of

on

used in real life situations to gain unauthorized access to a target system.

implementation

security

Both onsite and offsite testing Full manual and automated testing of your network Remote access testing Clear and understandable reports

BENEFITS:

Allow management understands the organization susceptibility to Internet-based attacks and the ability to withstand such attacks. Fig 3:Steps

Allow

identification

and

STEP 1: RECONNAISSANCE
The first and foremost step for a penetration test is reconnaissance. The main objective is to gather information about the target system which can be used in a malicious manner to gain access to the target systems. Successful reconnaissance can

rectification of the vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

Increase

availability,

confidentiality and reliability of your business-critical information and services.

Facilitate the design and priority on needs. implementing safeguards based on realistic and practical

often be successfully achieved through passive steps such as social engineering. Here, the hacker will attempt to probe relevant personnel into revealing sensitive information. Unlisted phone numbers, passwords and even sensitive network information are often divulged by unsuspecting employees and managers. Other techniques used include dumpster diving where an

STEPS

INVOLVED

IN

PENETRATION TESTING:
A penetration test is divided into four stages which involve the ethical hacker simulating all known techniques

organization's passwords.

trash is searched for

Scanning involves steps such as intelligent system port scanning which is used to determine open ports and vulnerable services. In this stage the attacker can use different automated tools to discover system vulnerabilities. Other techniques used in this phase include: Network Mapping Sweeping Use of Dialers Vulnerability Scanners

redundant sensitive information such as Active reconnaissance refers to the probing of a network in order to detect possible routes to access. These may include: Accessible hosts Open ports Location of routers OS details Details of services

At the end of this stage an intelligent attack strategy is compiled based upon relevant findings. The risk to a network if this stage of real life security attack was successful is considered to be very high. At the end of this stage the hacker would have established the points of entry with which to launch an attack.

STEP

2:

SCANNING

AND

ENUMERATION
Scanning refers to the stage where the hacker scans the network with specific information gathered from the reconnaissance phase. Scanning and Enumeration are intelligent ways of gathering sensitive information about the target companys network architecture. Information relating to the companys IP addresses, OS, DNS servers and Zone Transfer information can sometimes be extracted using specialist techniques that fall into this category. Scanning can essentially be considered the rational extension of reconnaissance.

STEP 3 AND 4: GAINING AND MAINTAINING ACCESS

This phase is where the ethical hacker will attempt to actually gain access to the target systems or network. The exploit could occur over a LAN, the internet, offline or as deception or theft. After the scanning phase where the ethical hacker has established all necessary information about target network, he will try to exploit possible system vulnerability to get into the actual network. Additional vulnerabilities could also be created using backdoor Trojans

or dialers. The penetration tester might need to use sniffer techniques in order to capture data packets from the target network. This is the most important stage of penetration testing in terms of establishing the potential damage to the target systems. During a real security breach it would be this stage where the hacker can utilize simple techniques to cause irreparable damage to the target system. What a hacker could and could not do would primarily Architecture Configuration of the target system Individual skill of the hacker Initial level of access obtained depend on four influencing factors:

In

order

that

the

target

companys security engineer or network administrator cannot detect the evidence of attack, the hacker needs to delete logs files and replace system binaries with Trojans. The attacker can use automated scripts and automated tools for hiding attack evidence and also to create backdoors for further attack.

ADVANTAGES:
Ethical hacking will reveal the flaws of what is being hacked (software, a website, a network, etc.) without actually causing any damage.An ethical hacker will find the flaw and report it to the owner so that it can be fixed as soon as possible.

CONCLUSION:
The security is a kind of trade off which has to be taken care of. If we are even dwelling the security into business the quality should not be trimmed down. This is applicable for both the service provider and the organization. Hacking has entered the age of mass production. People strongly disagree as to what a hacker is. Hacking may be defined as legal or illegal, ethical or unethical. With the present poor security on the internet, ethical hacking may be the most effective way to proactively plug security holes and prevent intrusions.

STEP 5: COVERING TRACKS

The final stage of penetration test or ethical hacking is to check whether the ethical hacker can erase or cover the mark that has been created in earlier stages of the test. At detected. present, This many successful where security breaches are made but never includes cases firewalls and vigilant log checking were in place. From this stage we can establish what attacks and exploits a hacker is able to cover up and which we can easily detect.

REFERENCE:

1. www.twincling.org 2. www.blackhat.com 3. www.ethicalhacking.com 4. www.wikipedia.org 5. www.purehacking.com