What is Cyber Security?

Before elaborating upon the difference between cyber security and ethical hacking, lets first understand what cyber security actually means. Cyber security can be defined as the practice or a process designed in order to defend networks, computers and data from damage, malicious attacks or unauthorized access. It is a combination of skills and tools which provides security to its users from any attacks on their data, devices or programs.

Cyber security is becoming more and more important day by day. Every organization whether government or private stores unprecedented amounts of data which is extremely crucial for that organization and needs proper security against any cyber threat. The global cyber threat continues to evolve at a rapid pace and every organization needs to take appropriate steps in order to protect their sensitive information especially those organizations that are involved in safeguarding national security data or other sensitive data.

Cyber security can be divided into different categories depending upon the context such as:

• Application Security

• Network Security

• Information Security

• Identity Management

• Data Security

• Endpoint Security

• Mobile Security

• Cloud Security

What is Ethical Hacking?

Ethical hacking is a part of cyber security and can be defined as the process of testing the system against all possible security breaches and solving any vulnerabilities in the system before any malicious attack even happens. Hacking is illegal but ethical hacking is the authorized practice of bypassing system security to identify any potential data threat. Ethical hackers try to examine the systems to pinpoint the weak points in that system that malicious hackers can exploit.

Ethical hackers are also referred to as white-hat hackers as their work involves the same as black-hat hackers but ethical hackers dont intend to harm anyone through their actions but only protect their systems.

Suppose that your website or application contains sensitive data about your customers. Malicious hackers can misuse this data for wrongful purposes. So, you will need an ethical hacker to prevent any of such malicious attacks from even happening and if it happens, then the ethical hacker will perform the necessary action required to stop the attack.