Terry Cutler, CTO and Certified Ethical Hacker at Digital Locksmiths, says the credibility provided by the CEH credential is also a great benefit. “I’m now a go-to person for the media,” he says. “Any time there’s a breach, I’ll get a call hours later from some local radio or TV station – ‘Tell me how this happened, and how it could have been avoided.'”
Cutler was working at Novell when he first got the credential, and he says he soon became a key advisor for the company on security issues. “I got a call while our guys were at Black Hat,” he says. “They said, ‘Hey, this guy claims to have hacked NetWare, and he’s about to go onstage in two hours – you’ve got figure out how this happened.’ And sure enough, we got it done in an hour and a half. We were able to figure out how he did it. So that training certainly helped – we were able to replicate the problem and capture all the debug information to be able to create a patch.”
After leaving Novell, Cutler says, the CEH credential enabled him to start his own company. “We were able to work with large partners and say, ‘Hey, I bet I can break into your product,'” he says. “Sure enough, we were given chances, and now we’re hacking into pacemakers in the medical industry, and hacking into other tools and products, helping them lock them down before the product ships to a customer.”
There’s one other advantage of the credential that’s worth mentioning, Cutler says – it’s just a great title. “It’s the coolest name on the planet … and it’s a conversation starter,” he says. “On my card, it says ‘Certified Ethical Hacker,’ and [people] will laugh and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ You explain it to them, they say, ‘That’s so interesting!’ – and you get some business from it.”
Read more at http://www.esecurityplanet.com/hackers/how-to-become-a-certified-ethical-hacker.html
