In the last year, ethical hackers prevented more than US$27 billion in cybercrime, according to a report released last week by a leading bug bounty platform. Ethical hacking involves an authorized attempt to gain unauthorized access to a computer system, application, or data. Carrying out an ethical hack involves duplicating strategies and actions of malicious attackers to identify security vulnerabilities which can then be resolved before a malicious attacker has the opportunity to exploit them. In its annual Inside the Mind of a Hacker report, Bugcrowd maintains that ethical hackers working on its platform were able to prevent those cybercrime losses to organizations by exposing vulnerabilities that would otherwise have gone undetected. The report is based on a survey of the platform’s users and security research conducted from May 2020 to August 2021, in addition to millions of proprietary data points collected on vulnerabilities from nearly 3,000 security programs. In the report, nearly three of four ethical hackers (74 percent) agree that vulnerabilities have increased since the start of Covid-19 due to the abrupt change that almost everyone underwent to make remote work possible. That sudden shift in network architecture, reports TechNewsWorld, happened so quickly, that most organizations focused on rapidly transitioning without giving much thought to security. As a result of taking the fast track, weaknesses and vulnerabilities will likely continue to be discovered.
