Protect your website with your ethical hacking knowledge

The first cause for websites being hacked is the lack of knowledge of
their webmasters.

Hackers or even wannabe hackers can modify your website home page,
steal your website profits and fame by just using ready to be downloaded
exploits published into trusted and untrusted internet security portals.

Wether you have a basic knowledge of web site publishing or you are
an experienced webmaster the only thing to protect yourself from hackers attacks
is ethical hacking.

Ethical hacking means understanding your enemy mind, skills, intentions and
strength, up to take the successful countermeasures that will save your daily hard job
into developing a successful and trusted web platform.

Image damages causing shareholders and customers complaints, not to mention
6 figures money loss, is what led many big corporations to hire dozens of ethical hackers
to keep their networks and web site safe from "bad" hackers.

In this article I am going to focus on the following two questions:
What do ethical hackers do?
What can I do to protect my website if I am not an ethical hacker?

The first step taken by hackers, should they be ethical or evil, is to scan your
web application for known vulnerabilities. This can be achieved through a
penetration testing process that can be manual or automated by some programs
and scripts. This is the most important and crucial task in every attack attempt.
And this is what an ethical hacker can't fail.

The second step is to get a working exploit to take advantage of the vulnerablity
found in step 1. Here is where protection and fixes should take place to *prevent* the attack and not
to just cure after the disaster. Ethical hackers in this case would be able to
modify source codes to cover the holes or just reduce the success rate of the attack dramatically.

I would strongly advise to work on the first step since it is the most simple
to master wether you're not expert into security field or you just don't have enough money to hire
an experienced ethical hacker.

Internet security knowledge is what can save your site with a very cheap price.
At the most basic level this can be achieved by keeping yourself informed on your
websites scripts well-known vulnerabilities, available patches and
security best practices.

Moreover the understanding of basic attacking vectors like Cross site scripting or SQL Injection will
keep you safe from a big number of wannabe hackers that you will be able to
defeat...with your knowledge!
So next time you will see some suspicious activity in your website log you will be laughing at it,
since not a dummy tool but your own knowledge as ethical hacker will be protecting you.

Armando Romeo aka Zinho is Computer Science Engineer and founder of Hackers Center security research group http://www.hackerscenter.com. In 2007 has launched the Ethical Hacking kit project located at http://kit.hackerscenter.com - the only package of papers and tools available for ethical hackers and webmasters to speed up their internet security learning process.