A day in the life of an ethical hacker

Ruben Martin Mondejar, 33, senior technical account manager of Trend Micro, has been working in the IT industry for more than 10 years, focusing on security as an ethical hacker.

His job is similar to that of a crime scene investigator (CSI)--to find the clues left behind by cybercriminals, putting the pieces together, re-creating the scenario and providing a root-cause analysis for customers and configuring their IT environment and solutions so that they are not attacked again. He works round the clock, debriefing his clients on all the stages of an attack.

On a day-to-day basis, Mondejar works from a proactive and reactive approach.

From a proactive stance, he conducts penetration testing such as port and IP scanning, checking the status of firewalls and planting malware into their IT systems, to check if their antivirus solutions actively detect them. He also sends out social engineering e-mails to identify the users in the organization who are easy to compromise, as well as the flaws within their security systems.

On the reactive side, he stops attacks from getting repeated to his clients by analyzing the footprints of cybercriminals, implementing solutions and trying to configure the solution.

Outbreaks are Mondejar's biggest challenge as an ethical hacker because he has to defend different sectors of the network while finding out the root cause of an attack.