Jordan Irving

12/8/22

Cyse 201S

An Ethical Hacker

         What is an Ethical Hacker? In simple terms it is an individual that is hired by a company to hack into their systems in order to find vulnerabilities, this allows the company to find out what areas they need to fortify so that they can prevent other hackers who they arent paying to gain access to their servers and exploit them for their own gain. This career is important becaus software engineers and developers do not always do a perfect job, they can have many flaws in what they create but don’t know because they see things in the way of a person who builds, not who destroys. Ethical Hackers make a large amount of money, typically falling inside the range of 6 figures, but actually save companies millions with how efficient they can make a companies system operate. 

      Why do ethical hackers matter to social science? I would say that the biggest reason of how the two correlate is the ways that the ethical hackers have to use their social resources in order to do their job to the highest degree possible. A high priority of an ethical hacker would be the principle of objectivity. The work they do must not convey their personal opinions of what a vulnerability is, but an objective view of what can be exploited by malicious hackers and what must be done to prevent said attacks. An E.H who is not able to separate their personal ideals and the overall wellbeing of the company can be harmful and allow for vulnerabilities to either not be taken care of or deliberately not taken seriously because the hacker doesn’t deem it important enough to himself. 

   These ethical hackers also need to be inept with scientific principles. A perfect example would be how they could use experiments in order to find flaws in certain systems. Honeypots can help because they could make an exploit appear to be available and easily accessible to hackers and actually be monitored to see the amount of volume it attracts. If it has a small amount of people creating a breach then maybe the E.H could decide to postpone any servicing and focus on something that attracts more hackers. This is just one of many examples of actions that can correlate between scientific principles and cybersecurity. 

   Unfortunately, the role of ethical hackers in society are mostly skewed to a certain demographic. According to CareerExplorer, 76% of Ethical Hackers are men and 42% of all ethical hackers are white while 9% are black and 6% hispanic. This seems to be the case with a lot of technology based careers in the U.S., with white men being the largest job holding demographic. This isn’t something that is not bound to change soon as a study showed that the percentage of female STEM grads are at about 19% and women are leaving tech jobs at an alarming 45% more than their male counterparts. I do hope that this changes in the near future because I would like to see cybersecurity become a more diverse field. 

     In conclusion, the career of ethical hacking can be rewarding but it still comes with its own deal of problems. There is little diversity in the career field and that can cause women and minorities to not feel interested in the job because it can make them feel uncomfortable when it is dominated by white and asian men. However, it does have a lot of aspects implemented from social science that can lead for more people to join because it isnt just all about computers and computer systems. 

References 

      Cveticanin, Nikolina. “Women in Tech Statistics: Girls Get Tech: DataProt Statistics.” Dataprot, ELITE CAFEMEDIA TECH, 14 Mar. 2022, https://dataprot.net/statistics/women-in-tech-statistics/. 

      “Ethical Hacker Demographics in the United States.” CareerExplorer, Sokanu, 14 Nov. 2019, https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/ethical-hacker/demographics/. 

      “What Is Ethical Hacking and How Does It Work?” Synopsys, https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-ethical-hacking.html#B.