Hunter Morgan – Journal Entry 13

The finding this article presents that I would most like to discuss was the fact that hackers are practically without a set value. More so even, a capped value, as the study shows they are hired at the same rate no matter what the price is. This is very good news for someone like me, who would like to become an ethical hacker or “penetration tester” as a career. I knew the pay was quite good for an ethical hacker, but after reading this article, it is clearer as to why. As an ethical hacker, you potentially protect a company from a real hacker attacking their data, which depending on the size of the company could be a great deal of money. This simply means that since without ethical hackers, companies would be at a higher risk of losing a large sum of money, so instead they pay a fraction of the potential losses to an ethical hacker. This works very well, since they are losing less money, and protecting the brand of the company as well, since if an ethical hacker gets into the system, it will not be publicly broadcasted like a real attack would be.