From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What's an example of ethical hacking?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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What's an example of ethical hacking?

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(enthusiastic electronic music) - There's a story that has not received attention that I think it should. There was a person in France, and he was the person basically in charge of the census, and IBM punch cards were there, and they were tabulating the census, and they were doing this thing, there was a religion field, if you will. And, what he realized, when Nazis invaded France, is that they wanted to use the census cards and data to effectively find all the people of Jewish ancestry. And so he basically hacked the system, so the punch card reader would not, could not understand that field, and so as a result, the data was effectively corrupted. And, if you look at the data sets of what happened as a result, and you look at the Holocaust, the percentage of Jewish population that was killed in other countries versus France, it's dramatically lower in France, but it's one of the early forms of what we've been able to discover of what is ethical hacking. When somebody says, I want you to use this data in a nefarious way that goes against certain norms, and there's no protections in place. - [Interview] Vigilante? - It's more than vigilante, it's an interesting thing. Because what this person has done, and his team said, effectively, is this is what we believe in as responsible use of data, and you are outside that responsible use of data, therefore, we are preventing the system from using that data, and we're corrupting it in a way that prevents you from using data. It's a force-multiplier of data from the inside, for good. (enthusiastic electronic music)

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