Introduction to Ethical Hacking & Cyber Security 2025

Explore hacking as reinventing or modifying software or hardware to beat the original objective, not limited to computers, and learn how human errors and vulnerable applications enable attacks.

Differentiate hackers from crackers and define black hat, white hat, grey hat. Explain how crackers spread cracked software and malware, while white hat hackers protect systems and report vulnerabilities.

Explore four additional hacker types: nation-sponsored, script kiddies, hacktivists, and suicide hackers, and learn how free tools, phishing sites, and credential theft enable cyber threats.

Check if your email has been compromised with have i been pwned or sold via have i been sold to see if your data appears in breaches or selling lists.

Trace the history of hacking from practical jokers in the nineties to MIT tech model origins, including trunk-line free calls, and show how hacking has evolved.

Debunk myths about hacking by showing it requires knowledge, practice, and experience, not magic, while exposing human weaknesses and software vulnerabilities like authentication bypass and phishing.

Demonstrate that free hacking tools are often backdoors and unreliable, as a scenario of attempting to hack a girlfriend's account exposes credentials and highlights security testing and vulnerability assessment.

Master the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—as the pillars of information security, with real-life examples of protected messages, unmodified data, and ensured access.

Demonstrate data integrity testing with hash calculators, generating and comparing MD5, SHA-256, and other checksums to detect file alterations and verify downloads.

Explore the rubber ducky usb stealer and its capabilities to harvest browser passwords and keystrokes via a usb device, including concepts like bad usb and keylogging.

Explore how a zip bomb uses nested zip archives, where a 42 kb file expands into massive data and enables denial of service by memory and storage exhaustion.

explain how fork bombs differ from zip bombs, forking multiple processes to exhaust resources and crash systems as a denial of service, with a bash demo and safety notes.

Explore the fork bomb concept through a practical Unix shell example, breaking down a self-replicating function and its resource impact observed in a virtual machine.

Explore how ports bridge client and server communication and how protocols govern exchanges, with examples like https and the total of 65,535 ports.

Explore how HTTP and HTTPS enable web page access, compare port 80 and 443, and explain how TLS and SSL certificates secure client and server connections.

Explore the file transfer protocol (ftp) by learning its ports 20 and 21, and demonstrate uploading, downloading, and listing files from a server via command line.

Learn how Secure Shell enables encrypted remote login to a server via SSH on port 22, using terminal commands like SSH, ls, cd, and cat to read files.

Explore telnet and its unencrypted remote login on port 23, contrast with SSH's encrypted connection, and examine the RDP protocol on port 3389 for Windows systems.

Explore the TCP/IP model and OSI model, their layers, data flow, and how the internet works within these frameworks, with practical daily-life implementations.

See how the OSI model guides a day-to-day online task, from powering a computer to sending a Facebook message, through seven layers and data flow with bits, frames, packets, and segments.

Define networks as connections of two or more computer systems, enabling file sharing and resource exchange; explore network types and media like telephone lines, radio waves, satellites, infrared beams.

Explore how a local area network (LAN) connects computers in small spaces like schools or organizations, can be wired or wireless, and keeps data secure by avoiding outside connections.

The metropolitan area network, or man, is a bigger network than land and covers a city or town area through telephone lines.

Explain how a wide area network enables long-distance data transmission. Show how WAN connections span from country to continent to the whole world, effectively linking users to the internet.

Explore how a personal area network interconnects devices within a small, specific range to enable data transmission. Learn examples like Bluetooth, wifi hotspot, and Zigbee that define PANs.

Explore other courses I have prepared for you in network security, web application security, pen testing, bug bounty hunting, reconnaissance, and more to upskill in on-demand cybersecurity skills.