Stay informed on ethical cybersecurity practices—discover insights, latest trends, and expert analyses on ethical information security topics.
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Background for this topic.
Ethical hacking is the authorized practice of simulating attacks to find and demonstrate security weaknesses before criminals exploit them. It may include penetration testing, red-team exercises, vulnerability validation, and reviews of applications, networks, cloud environments, or physical controls. The defining requirement is explicit permission: a written scope should identify approved systems, methods, testing dates, source addresses, safety limits, and contacts for urgent issues.
For practitioners, the main concerns are controlling testing risk and turning findings into useful remediation. Tests can expose personal or confidential data, disrupt production, or cross into systems that were not authorized; safeguards include least-necessary access, synthetic test data where possible, rate limits, secure evidence handling, and prompt cleanup. Reports should distinguish confirmed vulnerabilities from theoretical paths, explain business-relevant conditions and impact, and provide reproducible evidence without retaining unnecessary secrets. Coordinated disclosure and retesting help verify fixes, while legal, contractual, and privacy requirements determine what activities and data handling are permitted.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Dark Reading Confidential Episode 14: How curious, ethical problem-solving can continue to serve as a guiding principle for an evolving cybersecurity sector.
Bug bounty programs create formal channels for organizations to leverage external security expertise, offering researchers legal protection and financial incentives for ethical vulnerability disclosure.
Once dismissed as Internet miscreants in hoodies, ethical hackers have hit the big time, earning millions from blue-chip firms. And they say it's their diverse backgrounds that make them top-tier bug hunters.
The creators of the toolkit are advertising it as an educational and ethical resource, but what it promises to provide users if purchased indicates it's anything but.
In a world where insider threats, nation-state adversaries, and technological evolution create new challenges, companies must prioritize transparency, ethical leadership, and a culture rooted in trust.
Amnesty International said Serbian police used an exploit chain in tandem with legitimate mobile extraction dongle from vendor Cellebrite in an attack that brings up questions around ethical technology development.
Ethical hacking group Chaos Computer Club uncovered exposed data of electrical vehicle owners across the company's VW, Audi, Seat, and Skoda brands.
The Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) expanded its roster of members with the addition of threat intelligence management, collaboration and response orchestration vendor Cyware this week.
The US needs to seize this moment to set a global standard for responsible and ethical AI, ensuring that technological progress upholds and advances human rights.
At Black Hat USA, security researcher Michael Bargury released a "LOLCopilot" ethical hacking module to demonstrate how attackers can exploit Microsoft Copilot — and offered advice for defensive tooling.
Black Hat speaker and 13-year-old ethical hacker Marco Liberale talks about his interest in cybersecurity, and what opportunities he has in Saudi Arabia.
Ethical hackers were given voluntary access to digital scanners, ballot markers, and electronic pollbooks, all in the name of making the voting process more resilient to cyber threats.
By code or by command, cybercriminals are circumventing ethical and safety restrictions to use generative AI chatbots in the way that they want.
Putting the top 10 generative AI tools to the ethical test reveals more about humanity than artificial intelligence.
The draft AI Act represents a significant step in regulating AI technologies, recognizing the need to address the potential risks and ethical concerns.
Law firms have an ethical responsibility to protect their clients' sensitive information, but a recent swell of cyberattacks does not seem to be enough to convince law firms to shore up cybersecurity.
In two days, ethical researchers from 10 countries have unearthed more than 22 zero-day bugs in a wide range of technologies at the annual hacking contest.
Google's Android and Chrome Vulnerability Reward Programs (VRPs) in particular saw hundreds of valid reports and payouts for security vulnerabilities discovered by ethical hackers.
There's a fine line between a hacker and an attacker, but it pays to be proactive. Consider tests by ethical hackers, a red team, or pen testers, and then bolster your company's defenses against malicious attacks.
How CISOs handle the ethical issues around data breaches can make or break their careers. Don't wait until a breach happens to plot the course forward.