Published Paper Details:

Electronic commerce is an easy access to vast stores of reference material, collaborative computing, e-mail, and new avenues for advertising and information distribution. The government concerns, private companies and even individual citizens around the world are anxious to be a part of this revolution, but they are afraid that some hacker will break into their web server and replace their logo with pornography, read their e-mail, steal their credit card number from an on-line shopping site, or implant software that will secretly transmit their organization's secrets to the open internet. With these concerns the ethical hacker can help. In this article, hacker skills, their attitudes, and how they go about helping their customers to find and plug up the security holes. The ethical hacking process is explained, along with many of the problems that the Global Security Analysis lab has seen during its early years of ethical hacking for IBM clients.