AI makes ethical hackers 40% more effective, twice as productive, EC-Council claims


Cyber Pros need to turbocharge their skills with AI if they want to stay competitive. A certification company says that AI doubles an ethical hacker’s productivity and increases their effectiveness by 40%.

Ethical hackers combat cybercrime by proactively identifying and addressing security weaknesses before they can be exploited by malicious hackers.

EC-Council, a leading American cybersecurity certification, education, training, and services company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announced an updated certification program for Certified Ethical Hacker CEH v13. The training now includes artificial intelligence (AI) powered capabilities.

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“Learners will be equipped to leverage AI to enhance their hacking techniques, hack AI systems to automate their ethical hacking tasks while driving up to 40% efficiency in cyber defense and doubling their productivity,” the company said.

Attackers already use proliferating AI tools to scale up their operations, so network defenders need to adapt too. Building AI skills is already becoming a key factor for employers looking to hire and retain cybersecurity talent, EC-Council believes.

Course participants will experience more than 550 attack techniques and over 4000 commercial-grade security tools.

The course will focus on the top ten AI attacks, as defined by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), including prompt injection, insecure output handling, training data poisoning, and others.

“AI has already begun to radically transform the cybersecurity landscape," said Jay Bavisi, Group President of the EC-Council.

“As AI tools for both attackers and defenders continue to proliferate, building AI skills is already becoming a key factor for employers looking to hire and retain cybersecurity talent.”

The new learning framework consists of four stages Learn, Certify, Engage, and Compete. The learning step contains 20 modules and 221 hands-on labs. The certification step requires participants to take a 4-hour exam with 125 multiple-choice questions and a 6-hour practical exam with 20 real-life challenges.

The other two steps are optional. The Engage step helps develop real-world experience, while the Compete presents a different challenge each month.

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