What is ethical hacking? - 3

What is ethical hacking? - 3

Farmer and Venema elected to share their report
freely on the Internet in order that everyone could
read and learn from it. However, they realized that
the testing at which they had become so adept might
be too complex, time-consuming, or just too boring
for the typical system administrator to perform on
a regular basis. For this reason, they gathered up all
the tools that they had used during their work, packaged
them in a single, easy-to-use application, and
gave it away to anyone who chose to download it.11
Their program, called Security Analysis Tool for Auditing
Networks, or SATAN, was met with a great
amount of media attention around the world. Most
of this early attention was negative, because the tool’s

an automated hacker program that would bore into
systems and steal their secrets. Rather, the tool performed
an audit that both identified the vulnerabilities
of a system and provided advice on how to eliminate
them. Just as banks have regular audits of their
accounts and procedures, computer systems also
need regular checking. The SATAN tool provided that
auditing capability, but it went one step further: it
also advised the user on how to correct the problems
it discovered. The tool did not tell the user how
the vulnerability might be exploited, because there
would be no useful point in doing so.