The Hacker's Guidebook
TECHNICAL SKILLS


"Recognize ethical hacking as a lifelong journey filled with limitless lessons. Cybersecurity is not just a career path; it's a mindset, constantly evolving with every experience. It's an opportunity to learn something new or dive deeper into the realm of knowledge. So, grab your cyber weapons, don the black hoodie, embrace your cyberdeck, and start honing those cyber hoodie ninja skills for good!"
The Building Blocks of Ethical Hacking
So you want to become an ethical hacker and enter the exciting world of cybersecurity. That’s awesome! However, before you dive headfirst into firing up Kali Linux and hacking everything in sight, it’s vital to build up your foundational knowledge across several InfoSec domains. Mastering the fundamentals is what separates the effective, trusted security professionals from the often reckless script kiddies. This guide aims to give you a head start by introducing some of the key concepts every aspiring hacker should comprehend.
Networking Know-How: The Keys to the Kingdom
Having an in-depth understanding of how modern computer networks and infrastructure operate is utterly essential for hackers. You need to intimately comprehend topics such as:
TCP/IP Protocol Suite – The fundamental model allowing communication over networks and the core internet protocols powering connectivity. Learn how the OSI model divides computing communication into layers, each with their own vulnerabilities. Recognize IP addresses as identifies for targets. Appreciate how packets transmit data via routing, susceptible to intercepts.
Essential Protocols – Comprehend protocols like HTTP/HTTPS (enabling web content delivery), DNS (translating human domain names to machine IP addresses), SMTP (transmitting email messages), SSH (secure remote shells access), FTP (file transfer protocol for sharing data), LDAP (directory access for authorization), and countless more. Each protocol has extensive functionality…and weaknesses.
Network Hardware/Infrastructure – Become familiar with routers, hubs, switches, firewalls, servers, access points and other networking gear that combines to deliver connectivity. Know their individual roles in shutting traffic to understand how to potentially bypass or compromise infrastructure via flaws.
Wireless Networking – Appreciate how WiFi, Bluetooth, mobile frequencies, wireless encryption, authentication programs, and other concepts introduce complex new potential entry points for hackers and threat actors. Tapping into a company’s WiFi or network can offer a bridgehead into broader systems and lateral movement.
Why such predominant focus on networking? Because networks provide infinite potential attack vectors as a hacker’s core target. You need deep familiarity with the full spectrum – from web applications to wireless network cards – recognizing each component as a potential avenue of both penetration testing and cybercriminal exploitation. The key is realizing networks are the keys to the kingdom – master them, and many doors open to you.
Operating System Basics: Where the Magic Lies
While exotic hacking focused operating systems like the powerful Kali Linux, researcher-centric Parrot Security OS, or the infamous BlackArch may get much of the public limelight and attention, truly comprehending OS internals across environments remains utterly vital:
Linux Distributions – Especially Debian-based distros like Ubuntu. Additionally, pentesting focused OS’s such as Kali, BlackArch and Parrot Security. These are essential environments for many hackers and information security experts given their open source nature, allowing full customization and transparency unrivaled in proprietary OS’s like Windows.
Windows Internals – From legacy versions like XP and Server 2003 to modern renditions like Windows10/11, you should strive to intimately understand the windows system architecture across generations, including the file structure, essential system processes and services, registry hives, API calls, security defenses like Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and more. This will prove useful when professionally testing corporate networks where Windows predominates. Using virtual machines like FlareVM will help expedite developing expertise in cybersecurity concepts, malware investigations, and digital forensics.
Mac OS/iOS Underpinnings – While far less targeted by attackers than Windows, having prerequisite familiarity with the underpinning of Apple’s operating systems, derived from NeXTSTEP and fundamental Unix roots, will pay dividends in comprehending key OS concepts that translate across platforms. The ecosystem and usability of Apple’s various platforms have become popular in many business and enterprise workflows.
Taking the time to truly learn foundational OS internals, including users and groups, file system permissions, parent-child process relationships, how dynamic link libraries and services load, registry autostart keys, kernel modules, system calls and much more will provide intimate intuition for where privileged access and weakness may lie across environments. This builds hacking instincts that separate the hacking wheat from chaff.
Offensive Security: Hacking Tools & Techniques
In addition to networking and OS skills, the next big step involves comprehending common hacker tools and tactics used by security researchers and criminals alike:
Scanners – Understand vulnerability scanning programs like Nmap, Nikto, Nessus, Acunetix, Burp Suite and more, which help reveal network and application weaknesses through port probing, service detection, static code analysis and other means.
Exploitation Frameworks – Master environments like the venerable Metasploit Framework which contains hundreds of coded modules and payloads that when specially crafted, allow injection past defenses to execute malicious code, enabling access or denial of service. Additional exploit understanding comes through buffer overflows, shell-code injection attacks and research.
Social Engineering Schemes – Manipulating and deceiving humans tends to be far easier than compromising hardened systems. Common tactics here include phishing emails, voice phishing (vishing), SMS phishing (SMiShing), and other impersonation techniques to prompt victims to surrender credentials or enable malware.
Malware Capabilities – Malware allows bad actors potential access to systems through infection vectors like poisoned email attachments, drive-by web downloads, fake software updates and more. Understand capabilities of remote access Trojans (RAT), keyloggers, viruses, worms, spyware, adware, ransomware and botnets.
Web Application Attacks – The dominance of web apps introduces attack surfaces like cross site scripting allowing code injection, session hijacking for stealing credentials, exploiting logic design flaws, utilizing SQL injection to manipulate back end databases behind websites, and related methods.
Wireless Network Cracking – Traffic interception proxies like Wireshark combined with fake access points through penetration tools like hostapd or a WiFi Pineapple allow a hacker to intercept wealky encrypted WiFi traffic for plaintext capture or manipulate users into connecting with a fake “evil twin” network outright.
Thoroughly studying pentest tools and modern attack techniques helps reveal which technical and human weaknesses are most prone to exploitation both on authorized security engagements and by criminal attackers. Building comprehension here also better equips defense – enabling you to protect systems and think like an adversary. This section merely scratches the surface of core concepts new hackers should grasp – with additional essential domains spanning cryptography, physical access methods, web technologies, databases, malware reverse engineering, programming proficiency and beyond.
Recognize ethical hacking as a lifelong journey filled with limitless lessons. I like to look at cybersecurity and information assurance as a mindset more than just a career path – one that is constantly evolving everyday and every experience is an opportunity to learn something new or in more depth. Now I say go grab some Cyber Weapons, your black hoodie, a cyberdeck, and start responsibly honing those cyber hoodie ninja skills for good!