Hacking Basics

The book I read to research this post was The Hacker’s Underground Handbook which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This is a kind of general guide to hacking and I think is mainly aimed at people like pen testers or white hat crackers. It does detail how to get started in the field of hacking. You should aspire to become an elite hacker with programming knowledge and maybe even write your own hacking tools. The first programming language you should learn and it is one of the easier ones is HTML. Then you should move on to learning C which is what most tools are written in. You should aim to master the latest version of Windows and he recommends Ubuntu Linux as a good entry level version of Linux. It is user friendly and the vast majority of linux programs work quite happily with it. Often you will run Linux from a live cd which is what we call it when it isn’t installed on the hard drive and computer runs it directly from a cd in a virtual environment. Note you may have to change the boot order in your set up program to make this work. Many hacking programs are Linux only. You should also choose a program from each potential use you will have in hacking and focus on mastering it. You might use Wireshark for checking security on your wireless network. John the Ripper for testing the security of passwords etc. I did quite enjoy this book and do recommend it.

 

Hacking

The book I read to research this post was The Hackers Playbook by Peter Kim which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Peter isn’t a professional hacker but is very interested in the subject and has written this book about what tools he finds useful. There is a long list in the book of an example pen test and the tools you would use to carry out. In general carrying out a pen test is quite a fruitless task taking many hours and often achieving little in terms of actually succeeding in hacking the network you are testing. Normally if pen testers have hacked the network they feel they have failed in their job. Normally a computer used for hacking will be a dual boot with the latest version of Windows and he suggests Kali Linux which is optimized for cracking. You can automate a SQL injection attack with SQLMap. It gives a report on vulnerabilities as well as general information on things like what database and operating system are running. Cain and Abel is probably best for hacking passwords. He suggests taking tools that are useful and recreate them in another scripting language because that is the best way to learn how they work. One trick hackers use in installing malware on a computer is to give it an illegal filename that Windows doesn’t accept is appropriate. This can be starting with a number for example and the malware is still there but not displayed. Ettercap is a good linux program for finding passwords. Many hackers work in powershell for sending various commands because it works in the memory so if the computer is shut down there is no trace. I did enjoy reading this book and would definitely recommend it.