‘Deficit of 65K ethical hackers in the field’

Pune: There is a deficit of 65,000 ethical hackers in the field, said Anand Bhalerao at the Faculty Development Programme (FDP) on ‘Ethical Hacking and Security’ organised by the Department of Information Technology of the Bharati Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be University) College of Engineering (BV(DU)COE) at their Katraj campus.

He said NASSCOM estimated the need of around 80,000 ethical hackers in a year but only 15,000 are skilled, thus, causing a deficit of around 65,000 ethical hackers.
 
Around 38 faculties and researchers from five universities and 21 institutes participated in the programme. “This being the global scenario, coming up with Digital India, 94 per cent of companies perceive cybercrime as a major threat to business, out of which 78 per cent do not even have a cyber-incident response plan and urgently need White-hat hackers to secure their systems,” said Bhalerao. 

“The global cost of hacks, breaches and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack will reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. Today, corporations and organisations across all sectors face millions of attacks each day, which cost over $1 billion in losses annually,” he added.

Resource persons are experts in software development and training in the field of implementation and tools used for ethical hacking. The training consisted of six sessions, comprising informative sessions to introduce concepts followed by hands-on sessions to implement and practise the learned concepts. Head of Department of Information Technology Sandeep Vanjale said, “Ethical hacking is a way of objectively analysing an organisation’s data security structure. Realising the importance of ethical hacking in today’s digital era, this FDP was planned.”