Ethical Hacking: Fundamentals

Explore cryptography ideas through a ransomware project, covering the caesar cipher, one-time pad, AES block ciphers, and counter mode with a file encryption demo using OpenSSL.

Discover how ransomware encrypts files with a symmetric key (aes in counter mode) and uses public-key cryptography to secure the key, with a reverse shell to coordinate attacks.

Explore how PGP secures email by encrypting the message with a symmetric key and protecting that key with Alice's public key, enabling Alice to decrypt it with her private key.

Explore how tls 1.3 enables fast, secure key exchange using elliptic curve cryptography, client hello and server hello messages, nonces, and certificate authorities to prevent tampering and man-in-the-middle attacks.

This lecture explains Diffie-Hellman key exchange and its elliptic curve variant, showing how two parties derive a shared key using public and private keys, nonces, and HKDF, with forward secrecy.

Explore phishing through fake emails, SMTP, and DMARC protection; learn email infrastructure, DNS MX lookups, mail servers, mailboxes, queues, and how spoofing and relay work.

Explore how attackers create convincing fake sites and use phishing to steal credentials, including DNS squatting, deceptive links, and multi-stage redirects that trick users into revealing passwords.

Explore open source intelligence and link analysis with Maltego, using transforms to uncover data about domains, emails, and infrastructure via whois, Have I Been Pwned, VirusTotal, and the Wayback Machine.

Explore open source intelligence and mass scanning, including Shodan, to identify vulnerable machines, then use Nessus and Exploit DB to test exploits ethically in a virtual lab.

Explore how buffer overflow attacks in Heartbleed enable reading memory and potentially executing arbitrary code, illustrated through a TLS 1.2 OpenSSL case study with memory exploitation details.

Fuzzing feeds random inputs to programs to uncover bugs and crashes. It uses genetic algorithms for mutation and crossover to explore execution paths, with tools like AFL and Spike.

Explore symbolic execution and its extensions into concolic and dynamic symbolic execution, represent paths with symbols, and solve path conditions to generate test inputs while addressing path explosion.

Explore trojan malware via a case study of the Dvora Russian implant on Linux, detailing its hacker environment, client–server architecture, and open source tools for Android and Linux implants.

Learn encoding strategies to evade antivirus signature detection by encoding binaries with base64 and xor, packaging decoders, and using initialization vectors, illustrated with Metasploit modules.

Learn how rootkits use Linux kernel modules and drivers to hide malware, evade detection by ps, top, and antivirus, and achieve persistence and stealth.

Explore how rootkits hook system calls in the Linux kernel to hide files by modifying the system call table, and persist via bootkits and BIOS firmware.

Explore sql injection within injection techniques, demonstrate taint analysis and server-side sanitization concepts, and use sql map to practice attacks against a metasploitable web app.

Demonstrates sql injection on a vulnerable app, showing unsanitized inputs revealing data from accounts table. Uses sqlmap to test parameters and discuss defense per the OWASP top ten.

Explore hashing concepts and the MD5 anatomy, revealing one-way properties, fixed-length outputs, and collision risks. Learn how SHA-256, SHA-512, and SHA-3 improve security, and how hash cracking uses dictionaries.

Demonstrate using persistent cross-site scripting to store malicious JavaScript via beef, enabling the attacker to run code in victims' browsers, read cookies, and simulate phishing and other browser-based exploits.

Explore browser exploitation using beef and Metasploit to fingerprint, inject JavaScript, and move from browser to operating system via reverse shells, including water holing tactics.