chennai nowpada niranjan gets some of his adrenaline rush from listening to hard rock music but he is most excited when he is doing homework exercises hacking into a secure computer network breaking down firewalls and gaining access niranjan a second year software engineering student at vellore institute of technology vit is taking special courses on ethical hacking at adept technologies in cathedral road in chennai ethical hackers belong to an elite club of programmers smart kids aspire to be ethical hackers many big it companies pay ethical hackers to attack their security systems and discover vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit courses on ethical hacking are some of the most popular advanced computer courses in chennai with the yellow pages listing over 100 computer institutes offering these courses typically each class consists of around 15 students consisting mostly of professional programmers and some college students and lasts for about a month many ethical hackers are selftaught too to test a security system ethical hackers use the same methods as their less principled counterparts but report problems instead of taking advantage of them the endresult the company improves its ability to prevent any intrusion before it happens ethical hackers try to break the system and see if anything can be done to correct any issues or complaints that have been made says ananthan padmanabhan general manager at hcl chennai companies do not typically have ethical hackers in their rolls they instead employ penetration testers ethical hackers are outside experts living on the edge and veering dangerously toward the brink of what is acceptable for that reason companies pay them high salaries up to rs 8500 per hour so they stay on track and not move to the dark side often ethical hacking companies are just basement operations or an informal bunch of friends sharing work they are a group of specialized companies a bunch of small time players who hack as a profession they are paid by the hour but at high rates says hcls ananthan padmanabhan these hackers start breaking into systems for fun some do it for the thrill which soon grows into a passion i have been studying ethical hacking for over a month now i got into this because i was curious to know more about security in computers says ganesh a student of ethical hacking at indian institute of hardware technologies iiht based in vadapalani his brother saravanan also a student at iiht has created a community called perfect system admin on facebook and a hacking community on orkut at iiht all students who enroll in this prestigious course must hold a degree in computer engineering at either the graduate level or the postgraduate level and must also have some professional background a course consisting of two levels is taught for concerned parents and observers ethical hacking may well be a socially useful way of channeling youthful attraction to what is prohibited i am of the view that