Thousand of cyberattacks occur every year. In 2015, Microsoft evaluated that 81% of the big companies had been victims of cyberattacks. This is where the ethical hacker comes into play: a ‘nice’ hacker that works for companies to protect them against regular hackers.
Ethical hackers could replace computer engineers in the next decade. It is a profession that is still relatively new and unknown, and that any engineer with a passion for computing should take into consideration.
Ethical Hacker: Your Mission? To Think Like A Pirate!
The ethical hacker is an expert in offensive computer security and works for the protection of companies’ computer systems. Their mission is to cyberattack the company they are working for to test their security. With their actions, ethical hackers detect their companies’ computer systems’ weaknesses to protect them against actual hackers.
To succeed, the ethical hacker must think like a hacker to block them. Ethical hackers also have to make penetration tests by bypassing security rules to see if the information system set by the company can resist the attack.
Ethical hackers are recruited by big companies in cutting-edge industries or by computer services companies. Computing is their passion, and they can spend hours to find and solve weaknesses in a computing system. A good ethical hacker is curious, creative, reactive, and loves challenges. To become an ethical hacker, you can study in a school of engineering such as ESILV, with a major in cybersecurity.
Ethical Hacker: A Profession With Many Opportunities
Companies need ethical hackers to protect their computer systems from cybercrime. All kinds of lines of business are concerned: banks, finance, computing, public administration, automotive market, mass distribution, and so on. France especially lacks of ethical hackers. It is therefore a profession with a lot of opportunities.
A young ethical hacker earns about 67k euros a year, and their salary can go up to 90k a year with experience. Besides, ethical hackers are often rewarded with a salary when they manage to solve a glitch with bug bounty programmes.
If ethical hackers are already in function today, they will take a bigger part in cybersecurity in the next decade, especially with the progression of cyberterrorism and companies’ increasing dependence on technology, computer systems, and social networks.
Interested in cybersecurity? Check out ESILV’s programmes.