A layman would still consider hacking as a bad or criminal activity. However, it has become a full-fledged career field promising great job profiles, impressive remunerations and above all, a great deal of satisfaction. As an ethical hacker, you would be hailed as a saviour of digital data and systems that are extremely valuable for organizations in terms of money, reputation and security. So, how to become an ethical hacker in the easiest way possible?
The best answer would be to join an ethical hacking course. However, you must know a lot and make the right preparations before doing that. Here’s a discussion about the same.
Develop the Right Soft Skills
Interestingly, to become an ethical (or white-hat) hacker, you must have the qualities of an unethical (or black hat) hacker. Some of these qualities include:
- A common sense to perceive, understand and judge things around you
- Patience to stay cool even under extremely pressurizing situations
- Persistence to be determined in achieving the targets
- Problem-solving to exhibit the right attitude even when the things are complex
- Social engineering to convince and manipulate people
- Creativity to discover new ways of playing with the systems
If you are born with these qualities, learning ethical hacking would be fun. If you are not, don’t give up as you can acquire the required levels of these skills through efforts.
Learn Technical Skills
The next step is to develop the technical skills that include:
- Operating Systems: Linux and Kali Linux are among the most recommended operating systems to learn the art of hacking. This is because a majority of web servers run on Linux and hacking web servers is one of the top aims of hackers.
- Programming: Find out the best programming languages to start learning hacking right from the basics. Start with C and later advance to C++ and Python.
- Networks: Start understanding the concepts of networks as well as the related fields like cryptography.
- HTML: The Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) is another pre-requisite to learn ethical hacking easily.
Finally, choose the right course which adds to the above-mentioned skills by taking their concepts further. It may be a good idea to select a course that also covers related fields like digital forensics and data recovery.
Final Tip: To make the learning truly productive, adopt the habit of practicing everything you learn. Until and unless you exercise the hacking concepts in real, you might not be able to become a professional in it.