The first cause for websites being hacked is the lack of knowledge of their webmasters.

Hackers or even wannabe hackers can modify your website home page, steal your website profits and fame by just using ready to be downloaded exploits published into trusted and untrusted internet security portals.

Whether you have a basic knowledge of web site publishing or you are an experienced webmaster the only thing to protect yourself from hackers attacks is ethical hacking.

Ethical hacking means understanding your enemy mind, skills, intentions and strength, up to take the successful countermeasures that will save your daily hard job into developing a successful and trusted web platform.

Image damages causing shareholders and customers complaints, not to mention 6 figures money loss, is what led many big corporations to hire dozens of ethical hackers to keep their networks and web site safe from "bad" hackers.

In this article I am going to focus on the following two questions: What do ethical hackers do? What can I do to protect my website if I am not an ethical hacker?

The first step taken by hackers, should they be ethical or evil, is to scan your web application for known vulnerabilities. This can be achieved through a penetration testing process that can be manual or automated by some programs and scripts. This is the most important and crucial task in every attack attempt. And this is what an ethical hacker can't fail.

The second step is to get a working exploit to take advantage of the vulnerability found in step 1. Here is where protection and fixes should take place to *prevent* the attack and not to just cure after the disaster. Ethical hackers in this case would be able to modify source codes to cover the holes or just reduce the success rate of the attack dramatically.

I would strongly advise to work on the first step since it is the most simple to master whether you're not expert into security field or you just don't have enough money to hire an experienced ethical hacker.

Internet security knowledge is what can save your site with a very cheap price. At the most basic level this can be achieved by keeping yourself informed on your websites scripts well-known vulnerabilities, available patches and security best practices.

Moreover the understanding of basic attacking vectors like Cross site scripting or SQL Injection will keep you safe from a big number of wannabe hackers that you will be able to defeat...with your knowledge! So next time you will see some suspicious activity in your website log you will be laughing at it, since not a dummy tool but your own knowledge as ethical hacker will be protecting you.