In any profession, improvement plays a key role in growing your graph. If you are a practising ethical hacker or just someone who is currently receiving ethical hacking training, then this article is for you. As a white-hat hacker, you will face plenty of challenges on a daily basis like breaking into a tightly secured organisation or explaining something complicated to your less tech-savvy boss. How you handle the small challenges determines how large you will ultimately grow in your profession. It is hard to find new ways to improve yourself, especially when you are busy with your day to day work and occupied with the numerous tasks at hand. Below are listed a few things that you can do to make yourself a better ethical hacker in the long term.
Table of Contents
1. Never stop learning
It does not bode well for someone in such a dynamic profession to remain stagnant with their learnings. As an ethical hacker, you will be required to keep your knowledge up to date with discoveries, methodologies, techniques, and trends. To ensure this, try reading on a regular basis about advancements in your field.
2. Practice your skill
A good professional always keeps himself on the edge by sharpening his skill regularly. Black hat hackers are motivated by heavier and more lucrative gains than white hat hackers. As a result, they are always finding new ways to breach heavily secured organisations. Being an ethical hacker, it is very important that you do the same to keep your organisations secure and one step ahead of criminal hackers. You can practice your skills on Hack The Box, join bug bounty programs or take part in Capture the flag challenges.
3. Think like a hacker
Anyone who works in the area of crime prevention knows that clever thinking is one of the most vital components of excelling at their jobs. Not everyone, however, has the gift of cunning and shrewd strategies. It will be beneficial to your career if you get well versed with how hackers and criminals think in cyberspace. Reading actual cybercrime stories can help you build this skill and make you think more like a hacker so you can easily beat criminals at their own game.
4. Teach others about cyber security
Most of the time, a big cyber incident can be stopped by practising simple digital hygiene tips. As an ethical hacker, it will help your case, if you teach others about maintaining security in their individual capacities. This will not only help you build valuable relations with your co-workers but will also make your work easier in protecting your organisation against foreseeable cyber threats.
5. Study further
This is kind of a cliché but it always helps you become better at work. There is no doubt about the fact that the more you study, the better professional you will become. Sometimes, to obtain more responsibilities or a high-level job, you need to fulfil some qualification criteria. This means that those with better qualifications have a better chance of growing in their careers, all other things being equal. If you are a CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) certified professional, you can push yourself to gain higher credentials like the LPT (Licensed Penetration Tester) or CPENT (Certified Penetration Testing Professional) certification.
6. Go the extra mile
Lastly, to become better at what you do, you need to push your boundaries beyond what is expected of you. Going the extra mile always pays off. If you deliver more than what you were asked for, then you not only end up making your superiors happy, but you also end up learning quite a lot yourself and setting new standards for your work.
