World’s largest Certification Authority ‘EC-Council’ has recently certified 33 Computer Science Engineering students of Lovely Professional University (LPU) as ‘Certified Ethical Hackers’. This Certification is recognized worldwide and has received endorsements from various government agencies including the U.S. Federal Government. According to Sr. Director Steven Graham at EC-Council, the average starting salary for a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) is 95,000 US Dollars (approximately Rs 66 Lakh) per annum.
The EC-Council is best known for its professional certifications for the IT security field. It offers numerous certifications in a variety of fields related to IT security, including disaster recovery, software security, digital forensics, and General IT security knowledge. It has certified security professionals, including those of the world’s finest organizations such as the U.S. Army, the FBI, Microsoft, IBM, and the United Nations.
All of these certified students of LPU have opted for cyber security, either as engineering specialization, or minor, or working on cyber security information security projects. In this regard, students’ club ‘Cyber-Hack’ is also running at LPU campus under the guidance of LPU’s one of the Centres for Professional Enhancement. Head of the Centre at LPU, Prof Ankur Sodhi informs: “In the present era, certified professionals are in high demand. In order to train students on these lines, our ‘Cyber-Hack’ club at LPU focuses on cyber security learning and issues faced by the society in this specific field. For such issues on large scale, certified ethical hackers are employed by top organizations to penetrate networks and computer systems with the purpose of finding and fixing security weaknesses. In fact, ethical hackers never violate computer security for personal gains, such as stealing credit card numbers or harvesting any personal data.”
Some of these certified CSE students, Divjyot Singh, Bonic Sandeep, MV Sreenivasulu, U K Dabbeta, Mohit Balu, Vosuri Vamsi, shared: “We are very fortunate to join LPU as the curriculum to be followed here is as per the latest trends and aspirations of the industry and the society. With this certification, we and our parents too are feeling very secure about our glorious career ahead. We know well that there is an enormous gap in capable individuals to fill ‘Cyber Security Jobs’ currently, and in the years to come.”
Informing about their assignments, LPU students further told: “As ‘certified ethical hackers’ we also use the same methods as criminal hackers do to find weak spots in any of the company’s computer system. However, instead of making any personal gains, we correct the weaknesses as well as work to protect the existing system in order to prevent an outside security breach. We all want to be on the foot-prints of India’s renowned ethical hackers Ankit Fadia and Rahul Tyagi, where the latter is an LPU alumnus. ”
