Ethical hacking and vulnerability assessments are gaining rapid momentum as academic fields of study. Still, it is sometimes unclear what research areas are included in the categories and how they fit into the traditional academic framework. Previous studies have reviewed literature in the field, but the attempts use manual analysis and thus fail to provide a comprehensive view of the domain. To better understand how the area is treated within academia, 537,629 related articles from the Scopus database were analyzed. A Python script was used for data mining as well as analysis of the data, and 23,459 articles were included in the final synthesis. The publication dates of the articles ranged from 1975 to 2022. They were authored by 53,495 authors and produced an aggregated total of 836,956 citations. Fifteen research communities were detected using the Louvain community detection algorithm: (smart grids, attack graphs, security testing, software vulnerabilities, Internet of Things (IoT), network vulnerability, vulnerability analysis, Android, cascading failures, authentication, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), spoofing attacks, malware, trust models, and red teaming). In addition, each community had several individual subcommunities, constituting a total of 126. From the trends of the analyzed studies, it is clear that research interest in ethical hacking and vulnerability assessment is increasing.

作为学术研究领域，道德黑客攻击和漏洞评估正在迅速发展。尽管如此，有时仍不清楚类别中包含哪些研究领域以及它们如何适应传统学术框架。以前的研究已经回顾了该领域的文献，但这些尝试使用人工分析，因此无法提供对该领域的全面了解。为了更好地了解学术界如何对待该领域，我们分析了 Scopus 数据库中的 537,629 篇相关文章。Python 脚本用于数据挖掘和数据分析，最终综合包含 23,459 篇文章。这些文章的发表日期从 1975 年到 2022 年不等。它们由 53,495 位作者撰写，总共产生了 836,956 次引用。（智能电网、攻击图、安全测试、软件漏洞、物联网（IoT）、网络漏洞、漏洞分析、Android、级联故障、身份验证、软件定义网络（SDN）、欺骗攻击、恶意软件、信任模型，以及红队）。此外，每个社区都有几个单独的子社区，总共有 126 个。从分析研究的趋势来看，很明显，对道德黑客和漏洞评估的研究兴趣正在增加。