The business value of the three components of ethical hacking boils down to this: Every Manager needs multiple cyber approaches to achieve operational and cyber resilience.
Ensuring resilience helps firms to meet investor, board, and regulatory requirements, which is beneficial during fundraising and operational due diligence reviews.
What you should know—Ethical hackers are experienced professionals who help organizations probe for vulnerabilities that bad actors could exploit. Often, ethical hackers are also known as white hat hackers, penetration testers, or pen testers.
To be clear, ethical hackers are not criminals hired to access your secure environment. They are cybersecurity practitioners with deep knowledge on how to penetrate systems, analyze the shortcomings, and deliver clear recommendations to improve vulnerability management plans.
Drawbridge identifies 3 components of ethical hacking:
- Social engineering – This is a technique that targets the human element of cybersecurity. Social engineering is used to trick users to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or critical tools. Ethical hackers approach the individual using tactics like phishing emails and vishing to see if users can be tricked into giving unauthorized access to sensitive data.
- Simulated cyber attacks – This component is also called penetration testing, proactive method to identify system weaknesses and can help refine Incident Response Plans. This is a point-in-time exercise that focuses on the technical vulnerabilities in the Manager’s network and the rest of the IT environment. The penetration tester looks for weak points in the environment’s perimeter. In this case, the goal is to evaluate how the system would fare during an actual cyber attack.
- Risk-based penetration tests – This is similar to a simulated cyber attacks, where both approaches seek technical vulnerabilities by simulating a cyber attack. The difference is this test focuses on the most critical cyber risks to the Manager.
Get smart and take action – Drawbridge, the renowned name in cybersecurity for Alternative Investment and Wealth Managers, uses ethical hackers to perform simulated, risk-based penetration tests in addition to working with Knowbe4 to develop social engineering awareness campaigns.
To get more information on Drawbridge’s Internal and External Penetration and User Awareness & Training specifically tailored for Alternative Investment Wealth Managers, contact a Drawbridge representative.
