hack

Ethical hacking is a legitimate form of hacking that can be used to find bugs in other's systems and cause developers' attention to those vulnerabilities.

And this is what White Hat hackers do.

They are opposed by other hackers called Black Hat hackers. 

They are criminals who use their skills with malicious intent.

While the former are looking for vulnerabilities to patch the problem of the system, the latter seek to hack to compromise the desired data.

The most popular form of ethical hacking is the Bug Bounty program.

For that already over twenty years old. These services let companies find and fix bugs on time before attackers will find out them.

And also on the Internet, you can meet words like a penetration test or penetration tester, shortly pentest, and pentester.

Basically, it's the same as white hat hackers and it's also part of ethical hacking.

And two large companies provide such services, they are HackerOne and Bugcrowd. Also, Pentagon has chosen HackerOne to launch their program Hack the Pentagon.

There is a lot of money riding on Bug Bounty. 

In 2017, HackerOne published a report, from which it follows for 4 years ethical hackers have been paid more than $17 million for 50,000 bugs found.

And if one doubts if ethical hackers are necessary, then there is research from IBM.

IBM states in 2020 average damage of data breaches are more than $3.86 million. 

And half of them are cyber attacks. 

And from this report makes that it's better to prevent those attacks.

Since losses are huge.