Ethical Hacking: Techniques, Tools, and Countermeasures, 4th Edition

Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing

As an InfoSec professional, two of the terms you will encounter early on are ethical hacker and penetration testing. Today’s InfoSec community includes different schools of thought on the precise definition of each term. It’s important to separate and clarify these two terms to understand each one and how they fit into the big picture.

From everything discussed so far, you might think that hacking is not something you can engage in legally or for any positive or helpful reason whatsoever. This is far from the truth. It is possible to engage in hacking for good reasons—for example, when a network owner contracts with an InfoSec professional and gives that professional explicit permission to hack systems ...