This week on AARP's The Perfect Scale.

The bad guys know exactly what they want, they know exactly what they're targeting,

and that's infinitely harder to protect yourself from. Welcome back to AARP's The Perfect Scam.

I'm Julie Gets and with me today is my co-host Frank Abb now.

Frank, it's always great to see you.

Great to be here, thanks, Julie.

Frank, on this episode, we're going to talk about hackers,

but not the ones we typically think about,

typing feverishly on their keyboards and breaking into computer systems around the world.

But the other ones, what businesses refer to as ethical hackers.

Can you please explain what an ethical hacker is and what do they do?

An ethical hacker is somebody who really knows how to use their talent, their ability

in the right way to help companies know if there's intrusion software on their system,

if there's malware on their system.

They think like the criminal.

They don't look at it as the guy who got a degree in computer science.

They're looking at it somebody who really knows how to do these things,

so they know how someone would try to get into that company and they're able to find

a lot of flaws in their system, close down those flaws, know if there are hackers how to keep

the hackers out of the system or get them out of the system.

So how do you become an ethical hacker?

Do you have to have a criminal background?

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