Hacking

The Utmost Intermediate Course Guide in the Concepts and Fundamentals of Hacking

By: Zach Webber

Narrated by: William Bahl

Length: 1 hr and 20 mins

Publisher's Summary

Hacking. There are many words to describe hacking, but perhaps one of the most immediate would be the word “confusing”. Skilled hackers will often have a lifetime of computer usage and expertise under their belts. At the very least, they’ll often have several years’ worth of formal training or education at a given university. How can you get up to that level?

It will take a lot of work and a lot of effort on your end, but this book intends to help you with getting both of those things. By the end of this book, you’re going to have a firm understanding of how hacking works, how to manipulate networks, and how to get into whatever computer you’re wanting to.

Over the course of this book, we’re going to cover a lot of questions and topics, including:

• What is hacking?
• What are the different types of hacking? 
• Is all hacking bad?
• How do hackers think?
• How can I become a hacker? 
• How do I do penetration testing?
• What steps are there to penetration testing? 
• What is packet sniffing, and how do I do it?
• What operating system should I use for hacking?
• What are the foundations and concepts of hacking that I need to know in order to become a masterful hacker?
• And much more!

We’re going to be working pretty fast as we cover a variety of different topics, and we’re also going to be trying to cement our understanding of those topics in practical applications. By the end of this book, you’ll feel confident in your ability to apply these hacking concepts.

So, if you’re looking for the best book in the market to quickly and effectively learn how to hack, then look no further. This book has all of the information you need to get up to speed in terms of hacking. And unlike some other books, it’s not a serial handholder - nor does it leave you in the dust. This book masterfully goes through all of the different concepts that you need to know in order to become a more established and confident network hacker, but it does so in a way that leaves you feeling confident and like you know the material.

If you want to learn how to hack quickly and confidently, then this is the title for you. No book out there is as good at allowing you to learn how to hack so easily. 

©2018 Zach Webber (P)2018 Zapata Publishing

Teaches you how to think, not what to think

Hacking itself is a term that goes way back and refers to the act of tinkering; taking something apart, examining its internals, finding ways to mess up with it and do stuff that maybe shouldn’t necessarily be done. This is why people who do things as innocuous as programming Arduinos and Raspberry Pis may call themselves hackers, and per the hacking nomenclature, they’ve got every right to. Beyond that though, hacking just refers to the idea of using your technical knowledge in order to solve some sort of problem. You don’t have to be getting unrestricted access to other people’s information in order to be a hacker. Hacking is more about a frame of mind than anything else.

Hacking comes with a lot of prestige and power and it makes you feel like you’re on top of the world, which is why a lot of people do it. Indeed, there is something really liberating about using your technical knowledge in order to solve a problem, especially when you’re working with systems that ideally wouldn’t be able to be broken into. And this is where a lot of the money in hacking comes from the fact that you can break into these systems and show people points at which their systems are vulnerable.

Hacking is both an essence and an ethos. It starts with an essential curiosity. The best hackers are the curious ones. Some people try to hold off their curious tendencies by adhering to that old adage “curiosity killed the cat”, choosing to stay comfortable and not test the boundaries of what’s possible. Unfortunately, if one would like to be a hacker, this is not an option. Hackers, unfortunately, do not have the comfort of the non-curious mind. And truly, it is a comfort to be non-curious and to not tuck yourself away in the comforts of what you know seeking all answers from a book. But it is curiosity that changes the world. Though it might kill the cat, curiosity also uncovered the quark, phreaked the phone line, invented the computer mouse, and created the light bulb. It is through curiosity that you will be able to unleash your technological prowess upon the world, one computer terminal at a time.

This book is going to mainly focus on those aspects of intermediate network and information security hacking that are extremely relevant to anybody looking to become a hacker. By the end of this book, you’ll have a firm enough grasp of various concepts which build upon the concepts explored in the first book that you’ll be able to start working with more and more complex hacking environments and information.

Coding knowledge will help

Its a good course for those who want to go beyond beginner level . Each lesson is in sequence and provides proper knowledge about ethical hacking like Chapter 1: The Fundamentals of Hacking Chapter, 2: Internet versus Intranet Chapter, 3: Remote Access and the Extranet Chapter, 4: The Concepts of Hacking - White Hat Hacking vs Black Hat Hacking Chapter 5: Pentesting, Footprinting, and Scanning, Chapter 6: Enumeration and System Hacking and Chapter 7: Sniffing Traffic - Programs to Use and Benefits. Lectures are clear and useful for students. In these cases, the only option is to keep going. Remember that you have to stay humble and accept the myriad things that you don’t know. You’re inevitably going to run into them constantly, so being aware that they exist and giving yourself a proper emotional framework to deal with them and keep pushing through until you find a solution. Eventually, you’ll be able to find one. Remember the vast multitude of things that you don’t know and keep yourself humble as you press forward and try to just become a better programmer. Positive course for me . Highly Recommended for students.

Learn What is Happening Under the Hood

Remote access is the simple notion of being able to connect to a computer and then execute commands from it or obtain information from it. This isn’t always done with the other user’s permission. A familiar and legal form of remote access include things such as the Putty interface for allowing one computer to interface with another is PuTTy, an SSH and Telnet client which allows one to execute terminal commands on another computer after logging into it over a network. Another example would be TeamViewer, which allows one user to connect to another user’s computer in order to take control of their mouse and keyboard

Remote access trojans are noteworthy because they offer a hacker the ability to have complete control of the victim’s computer. For example, they can record the user’s keystrokes through built-in keyloggers or access vital information stored on the system. They can drop off additional viruses through the RAT. They can take screenshots of the user’s system or can activate the user’s webcam and record video without their permission. They can reformat people’s hard drives, and they can also retrieve any sensitive information stored on it.

All in all, remote access trojans are one of the most difficult-to-deal-with and dangerous viruses out there, particularly because they demand the hacker’s attention, which means that your information isn’t just passively being extracted - your life is being actively surveyed by the hacker, who is waiting for an opportunity to retrieve information. Its not an easy read, and you need to have some solid understanding of the machine as a whole. After I played with buffer overflows in a VM I went back and appreciated chapter 0x200s coverage of registers and what they do.

Additionally, when you’re a hacker, you’re automatically at higher risk for getting computer viruses since you’re working with other hackers every day, so having an idea of how computer viruses and remote access trojans in particular work can be a lifesaver and can keep you from ending up in a situation that you really don’t want to be in. Knowing how they work gives you the framework and the opportunity to really start to protect yourself.

Excellent book for C coders.

Hacking: The Utmost Intermediate Course Guide in the Concepts and Fundamentals of Hacking by Zach Webber is a must read for any educator considering the possibilities of throwing out the grades and hacking the way we have always assessed our learners! This book contains proven steps and strategies on how to learn to hack quickly, effectively, and without skipping over any major details. The theory behind this powerful text is rooted in the idea that we don't need grades to ensure that our students are learning. Zach helps readers understand that going gradeless and hacking the traditional forms of assessment is possible in any classroom, school or even district. Zach also offers readers 7 special chapters, along with dozens of other powerful nuggets of information, to starting and completing the journey of What are the foundations and concepts of hacking that I need to know in order to become a masterful hacker. Bahl (Narrator) repeatedly reminds the readers that grades don't represent the depth of student understanding or learning and in fact often stifle our learners and their ability to express their knowledge. As an educational leader, this book helped me see the possibilities of hacking traditional assessments and how that type of innovation could have a positive impact on students, teachers and the community as a whole. Zach reiterated the point that just because we have always done grading this way, it doesn't mean we have to keep doing it this way – it is time to empower our students as learners and make assessment part of the experience and not the end of the journey. Anything that helps empower students and engage them in every step of the learning process, with an important emphasis on self-reflection and self-assessment, is a critical focal point because that will help make our students college, career and life ready! So, the time has come to throw out the grades, hack our traditional forms of assessment and unleash the creativity in our learning spaces and empower our students to take control of their learning from start to finish!

Great Intro to Shellcode! The way forward

One major example rests in the hacking subculture of skids or skiddies. Short for “script kiddies”, this subculture within the hacking community refers largely to those people who don’t actually understand anything about hacking and are just getting by using the tools and programs that others have already made. Skids are heavily looked down upon by the more veteran hacking community because of the fact that they often don’t understand the reasoning or the computer science behind the things that they’re trying to do. As a result, it’s not uncommon for script kiddies to slip up and land themselves in hot water legally just by making mistakes that to a veteran are far more obvious, either by failing to utilize the software they’re trying to use appropriately or by failing to take the proper precautions as a skiddie such that they can actually work effectively and anonymously.

So in essence, if you want to start fitting in with the hacking community, humbleness is a great place to start. Understand how little you understand and how little you know in the grand scale of hardware, and contextualize it with how much you have left to learn. If you’re trying to start hacking and you start out as an arrogant script kiddie, or if for any reason you think that you’re going to be hacking systems by this time next week, you have the wrong set of expectations and could very easily land yourself in jail just through your own stupidity.

In essence, the underlying concepts of hacking and how they correlate to blackand white-hat hacking are pretty simple. Remember as you go forward that there are a few key traits that you’re trying to build within yourself. These are curiosity, excitement, patience, and humility. If you are able to build these skills, then you’re already on the road to being a fantastic hacker. If you have these skills already, then hopefully this chapter was able to help you better contextualize them within the realm of hacking and understand how and why they apply to anybody who wants to become a hacker themselves.

5/5 Book, without a doubt

A long discussion about what not to do in hacking, the basic foundations and concepts of hacking, and all of the things that you can do in order to develop a hacker mindset for yourself. This will allow you to not just hack but to think like a hacker, which helps you to become a better hacker in the long run. It's a great hacking book for those not well-versed in computers because it has a lot of definitions of terms. I wasn't really looking for that since I learned that from another hacking book. I was looking for something more hands on where I can really practice some hacking techniques. The good news is that there are some great chapters here that separate this book from the other hacking books and articles I've read. It covers phishing, wireless network intruding and several other sources and tools for hacking. Other parts like the history of viruses didn't cut it for me but I think some people might be fascinated with those because at least the writing is good. This book was a great validation of some ideas I had, but wasn't sure about implementing at first. I started a gradeless classroom before reading this book and sometimes questioned my methods, but as I read this book, I realized I was already doing many of the Hacks described! This book gave me the encouragement with students as they self-assessed their skills. Students were more willing to take risks and try something new with this style of classroom. Students took pride and ownership of their work and are actually very critical of themselves, which pushes them to try something new for their next project. The best part - my class is made of of seniors and they could have easily challenged this new idea or slacked with senioritis, but they didn't - this class has become one of the highlights of my day!

In this book you will know what is Hacking

What is hacking, and how does one go about doing it? This book answers that question and much more, as we learn all of the details that go into the brutal science of penetration testing, discuss different hacking paradigms like white-hat hacking and black-hat hacking, briefly discuss hacking history, and essentially take things to a more extreme degree than we did in the beginner book. By the end of this book, you’re going to have a firm foundation in hacking and have a solid idea of how network hacking works.

The essential knowledge necessary to build up a basic idea of what hacking is and how it works. We'll elaborate on that in this book, using network programming concepts to break into susceptible computers over the internet and other networks, as well as exploiting the flaws you identify to deposit payloads that give you (approved) control over a host computer.

When you obtain access to a computer's network through open ports and other methods, you can use packet sniffing to figure out what's going on. As we've already mentioned, this can provide you with useful information. When you download Wireshark and begin practicing with it, it will become immediately evident why this is so important to you as a hacker, as well as the several pieces of essential information you can gather from a tool like Wirehacker.

This is a nice audio book for a novice

This is a nice audio book for a novice. I, on the other hand, enjoy taking it as a refresher. It's a simple song to listen to.

I love it!

This audiobook was the best learning tool in The Utmost Intermediate Course Guide in the Concepts and Fundamentals of Hacking.

Change the way we assess learning.

I wish all teachers and administrators would read this book and help change the way we assess learning.

The book plays true to its tagline

The book plays true to its tagline, providing just enough information without overwhelming the newbie (like me).