Don's Introduction to Ethical Hacking for Beginners

Define hacking as interacting with systems outside their intended use and outline hacker types from blackout to white hacks and gray hat.

Navigate the fog of law to understand what constitutes ethical versus illegal hacking, authorization, and privacy concerns in a global context.

Learn how penetration testing, or ethical hacking, uses authorized simulated attacks to evaluate security, covering vulnerability assessment, white/black/gray box testing, and red team exercises.

Explore Linux navigation with pwd, mkdir, cd; copy and move files with cp and mv; manage permissions with chmod and setuid; view files with cat, head, tail, and less.

Master grep pattern matching to search and highlight lines across files with flags like -i, -r, -L, and -v; learn basic file and text tools like touch, nano, and wc.

Set up a netcat listener to transfer a hello world file to a remote box and observe a remote bash prompt with input redirected to output.

Discover how nmap identifies live hosts and open ports. Learn to scan individual hosts or subnets to map an attack surface using discovery probes and syn or connect scans.

Explore Nmap scan techniques, including tcp syn and udp scans. Learn how privileged access shapes results and how to use port ranges, service detection, operating system detection, and scripting options.

Explore how whois fingerprinting reveals domain ownership, contact details, and attack surface insights, including the role of privacy protection and using the whois command to map targets.

Master Google hacking by using advanced search operators to refine queries and uncover exposed data such as usernames, passwords, databases, and vulnerable files on targeted sites.

Perform DNS enumeration to identify all IP addresses behind a domain by performing DNS lookups, whois checks, and zone transfers, then map the attack surface for subsequent scanning.

Learn how Dirbuster brute forces directories and files on a web server using word lists to reveal hidden pages, login portals, and the overall attack surface.

After reconnaissance, map the target's service versions and banners, then search exploit databases for publicly released exploits to identify a backdoor and its code, and test credentials across sites.

Explore major security vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed, Shellshock, and Dirty Cow, and learn how they arise, how exploits work, and how to adapt exploit code across Windows and Linux environments.

Explore how Heartbleed exploited OpenSSL's heartbeat extension by lying about payload size, enabling reading memory up to 64 kilobytes and exposing sensitive data.

Explore how dirty cow leverages a race condition in the Linux kernel memory subsystem to escalate from a low-privilege user to root by abusing copy-on-write and read-only memory mappings.

Explore shellshock, a bash vulnerability in CGI scripts enabling command execution by abusing variables and functions passed to child processes. Learn how the pausing conversion flaw spreads via web servers.

Leverage automated and manual vulnerability scanning to map the attack surface across web and infrastructure targets, using up-to-date databases to identify known weaknesses and prioritize exploitation steps.

Use Dirb to perform directory brute-forcing on a purposely vulnerable web lab, discovering hidden pages, credentials, and sensitive data across multiple applications.

Explore how the Nikto web scanner, an older open-source tool, performs a simple, checklist-driven assessment of a web server. It reveals server versions, headers, robots.txt entries, and exposed credentials.

Discover how arachni, a web scanner, tests modern web apps by authenticating with cookies and credentials, configuring scans via profiles and scopes, and detecting code injection and cross-site scripting.

Learn how to use WPScan to map a WordPress site's attack surface, enumerating users, plugins, themes, and detected vulnerabilities, and review results from the scan.

Learn to use Nessus to perform internal network scans, identify hosts and services, run vulnerability checks, and review findings to prioritize remediation.