Ethical hacking. Could there be a bigger oxymoron? But as Abhijeet Parandekar ushered me into his lab in the Asian School of Cyber Laws, Pune, he showed no signs of guilt. “This is my playground. I work for eight hours here and play after that,” he said with a grin. It was after much coaxing that the computer expert had agreed to share his secrets and teach me to hack “with ethics”.

For Abhijeet, to be an ethical hacker is to be the good guy. You attack a security system on behalf of its owners, looking for weak links that a malicious hacker could exploit. In short, you know all the low tricks but use them for a better cause. And, from my experience of interviewing an ethical hacker a year ago, I also know that they are, well, quite cool. “I will first teach you how to hack passwords, then how to hack documents and then how to hack a computer,” he said with surprising matter-of-factness.

So, we made an MS Word document, which he asked me to lock with a password. “It could be anything,” he said. “Fly,” I said. To hack, you need the right software. (Abhijeet refused to disclose the name of the software we were using. So if you thought I ran out of the lab and into the exciting life of a hacker, you are mistaken.)

On the desktop in front of me, were numerous tools—with names like the Horse Riding, the Action and the Bleak Reader. I chose the first and clicked. In a few hundred seconds, the device dived into the sea of words that had been keyed into the system and fished out five. The third was “fly”. “Oh, god. It’s actually happening,” I said. “Yes, and it can happen in many more ways,” said Abhijeet primly. “This technique compares each word in the dictionary with the password and matches it,” he says.

... contd.