Ethical Hacking in Nutshell

This is a content of a seminar on hacking I attended when I was in school days. I tried to recollect the points and summarized here. This gives a brief introduction on hacking and my forthcoming posts address different modules in hacking and its counter measures, all in nutshell for people who are bored of reading volumes of books on this subject yet interested to know the stuff. I have done all that homework of reading and experimenting so as to present you the content here in the most concise way possible. As this is addressed to variable knowledge audience, I will start everything from level zero. However, I assume readers have basic knowledge on computer and its terminology and also a bit of networking and security knowledge.  

When you hear the terms hacking and hackers, most people straightway start associating the term Hackers with computer criminals or people who cause harm to systems, release viruses and so on. And I do not blame them for holding such a negative opinion. Unfortunately, one tends to blindly accept what is being fed to them by popular media.

Types of hackers:

1) Black hat hackers: Masters of hacking!! Bad guys

A computer criminal sitting in one corner of a dark room and committing a crime. He is the one who breaks into a computer system or network with malicious intent.

2) White hat hackers: Good guys!

These are actually good, pleasant and extremely intelligent people, who by using their knowledge in a constructive manner help organizations to secure documents and company secrets, help the government to protect national documents of strategic importance and even sometimes help justice to meet its ends by ferreting out electronic evidence.

3) Grey hat hackers: Dangerous guys!!

A gray hat hacker is a combination of a Black Hat Hacker and a White Hat Hacker. A Grey Hat Hacker will surf the internet and hack into a computer system for the sole purpose of notifying the administrator that their system has been hacked and suggest him the ways to secure it by charging small fee.

Foot Printing is the first step in hacking, which is collecting information about the target system / network to be hacked. This can be done using the following applications:

Sam spade, neotrace visual route, email tracker pro etc. The same can be achieved via web from the following sites:

www.whois.net

www.netcraft.com

www.dnsreport.com

www.mailtracking.com

www.technicalinfo.com

and many more. These websites are useful in gathering info about the target system.

The next step after gathering information is to find out the ways to enter in to the network which is called Scanning. This is the first action taken against the target network. In this phase we use info obtained from foot printing and move deep in to the network.

Scanning basically involves IP scanning, Ports and services scanning and vulnerability scanning. Some of the tools used here are Angry IP scanner, Super scan, Retina, Shadow Security scanner. These are basically used to identify the open ports and services and the application used to host the service, which in turn give us an idea of which functions the server is performing, and can also find the OS being run on the machine and so on.. Once the OS and the Services are determined exploitation of those services can begin. Taking advantage of the vulnerabilities is called exploitation which I discussed in my previous post Breaking in to computers- Newbie Series-2 here.

The next step is obviously the exploitation and is called “Exploits and Enumerations” involves checking the severity of the vulnerability or the weakness. Based on this we develop a piece of software, script or use the already existing tools to exploit. Some of the common vulnerabilities can be found in the below websites:

Securityfocus.com

Packetstrom.com

Milw0rm.com

These sites give a brief description of the vulnerability, and code/script to exploit and also security measures / the ways to patch this vulnerability. This is how we proceed further with tasks like sniffing, phishing, hacking email accounts, session hijacking, hacking websites, wifi hacking etc. In my future posts I will discuss each of these activities in detail and how can you identify and block any unwanted intrusions to your network or system. I will stop here and  I wish you happy hacking:)