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    A First Course In Ethical Hacking
    A First Course In Ethical Hacking
    A First Course In Ethical Hacking
    Ebook208 pages1 hour

    A First Course In Ethical Hacking

    By Herman van Heerden

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    About this ebook

    As a youngster, the romance of hacking took hold of my imagination. Computers were always my passion, and the myth (legend?) of kids who moved a satellite by messing around were well known and the subject of daydreaming. But where to begin? While still working a student job, I got my hands on the “Hackers Handbook". To put things in perspective, the internet was young, Microsoft did not believe in CD-ROMs and “Do you Netscape” was the web browsing term.Modems were the way you connected.I printed the entire “Handbook” on a dot matrix printer, ready to enrich myself with the knowledge of hackers. The text was about BAUD, modems and the protocols used by BBSs. I found the reading as exiting as a student who got his hands on a banned copy of The Little Red Book. But the content proved rather less than insightful. Yes, hacking was different when the words were uttered “the beauty of the baud” (from the original Hackers Manifesto), but times have changed and changed again in a very short period of time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateApr 9, 2013
    ISBN9781300920632
    A First Course In Ethical Hacking

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      Book preview

      A First Course In Ethical Hacking - Herman van Heerden

      A First Course In Ethical Hacking

      A first course in ethical hacking

      A first course in ethical hacking

      By Herman van Heerden

      eBook ISBN: 978-1-300-92063-2

      Text copyright © 2013 Herman van Heerden

      All rights reserved, except where else indicated

      Thanks Mia!

      Preface

      For some time now I have realized that the only relatively quick way to obtain knowledge of hacking, is to bite the bullet and attend a course in IT security.  This is not a bad option, but where do you begin?  Who will tell you what hacking really is about, without adding an oversized dollop of Hollywood flair to sell the course?

      As a youngster, the romance of hacking took hold of my imagination.  Computers were always a passion of mine, and the myth (or is it legend?) of two kids who moved a satellite by messing around with computers were well known and many a time the subject of daydreaming.   But again - where do you begin?  While still working a student job in my first year at university, I got my hands on a text marked the Hackers Handbook (http://www.textfiles.com/etext/MODERN/hhbk).  To put things in perspective, the internet was young, Microsoft did not believe in CD-ROMs and Do you Netscape was the term used for web browsing.  Modems were the way you connected.  Well, I printed the entire Hackers Handbook on a dot matrix printer **** and put it into a file, ready to enrich myself with the knowledge of the hacker.  The text was all about how BAUD works, modems and the protocols used by BBSs.  I found the reading as exiting as a social studies student who got his hands on a banned copy of The Little Red Book or Animal Farm, but in the long run, the content of the book proved rather less than insightful.  Yes, hacking was different when the words were uttered the beauty of the baud (from the original Hackers Manifesto), but times have changed and changed again in a very short period of time.

      As with that original Hackers Handbook, I believe this book will also be seen as ancient text in a far shorter time that I hope it to be.  But for now, this is a great beginning for the inquisitive mind that asks the question how do you hack? and does not know where to begin.

      This book is not intended to train you as a prospective member of Anonymous, but it is to satisfy the curiosity of the methods used by the elite.  I don’t want to you become a criminal, and the knowledge I would like to impart is for you to find your intellectual home amongst the security specialists so highly valued by the IT industry.  It is not a crime to talk about bombs, or to even investigate the science behind explosives; thus, this book should not be seen as a guide to become a criminal.  It is in any case just a nudge in the right direction to understand.

      Some people have the ability to just know, but I am not one of those.  I need a nudge in the right direction.  And my sincerest hope is that this book will help you find the edge of that rope that is knowledge.  Just don’t hang yourself with it!

      Herman van Heerden

      B.Sc. Hons (Cum Laude) in Computer Science

      Certified Information Security Expert

      Table of content

      Introduction

      For the beginner: Network basics

      1st Stage: Information gathering

      Case study – Kevin Mitnick

      Social engineering

      Dumpster diving

      Physical visit

      Personal details of the target

      SPAM and email spoofing

      Browser vulnerabilities

      Users and user rights

      2nd Stage: Scanning

      Port scanning – nmap

      Network scanning – autoscan

      Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS)

      Firewalls and honeypots

      Proxies and tunneling

      Web FUZZING

      3rd Stage: Gaining Access

      Case study – WikiLeaks

      Ethical parameters and the moral gray area

      The Word Wide Web

      Client side versus server side scripts

      Finding information on the website you visit

      SQL injections

      Cross site scripting (XSS)

      Session hijacking

      System/OS access

      4th Stage: Maintaining Access

      Case study – Sony BMG

      Ethics – Contract period and backdoor disclosure

      OS level access

      Viruses, Works and Trojans

      Steganography

      5th Stage: Covering your tracks

      MS Windows™

      LINUX

      MacOSX

      TOR

      A final word

      Introduction

      This book is an introduction to ethical hacking.  Let’s explore this, shall we?

      Introduction:

      Please, do not expect this book to take you by the hand and show you how to hack your friend’s Facebook account.  We investigate the science behind hacking.  Application of the knowledge is up to you.

      2.       Ethical:

      How can hacking be ethical?  A rose by any other name…  We see the implementation of what we do and want to allow you to do as the basics of the IT security trade.  The word hacker has been used and misused so many times.  So rather than stressing the semantics, we believe you should know the tricks of the trade.  The way you use it is yet again up to you.  We believe you will choose the ethical path, and not use your knowledge for evil.  With great power…

      3.       Hacking:

      Hacking, in the mind of the public, is the guy (or girl) with the skill to access computer systems where access seems closed to others.  Knowingly or unknowingly, these people have processes they follow.  We have spelled out these processes, allowing the magic to seem quantifiable.

      As inspiration, we have followed the most popular courses in hacking’s example, and defined 5 stages of a hack.  These are:

      Information gathering

      System scanning

      Gaining access

      Maintaining access

      Covering your tracks

      Using these headings, we will look at case studies and examples of each.  This will clarify the stage better than any definition will ever do.  All these cases are true and can be research in more detail online.  We will use the Wikipedia entries as base, giving you the right end of yarn.

      In addition to just examples, we will go into more practical stuff as well.  We advise you to get yourself BackTrack5 and write it to DVD or USB stick.  It is the key item in the arsenal of a hacker; everything is configured and ready to use.

      Remember, it is against the law in most countries to run scans against other people’s systems.  So, without authorization, you are on your own.  For this book, and for scans, we will recommend you download and run a broken LINUX distribution called Metasploitable (http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Metasploitable). It was built to test the features of the Metasploit toolset.  We will explore this application as well, but our focus is to understand the mechanics behind it.  So, test the suggested and demonstrated tools first.  As a self-study exercise you can replicate your results on the Metasploitable distro with the Metasploit tool itself.  Remember, sometimes one tool alone will not give you the hidden answer.  So understand the methods, and the tool becomes just that: a tool, not the be-all and end-all of security testing.

      For the beginner: Network basics

      Introduction

      If you are reading this book, you most probably know all about the content of this chapter.  But as a warm-up exercise, and to get everyone on the same page, we will run through the basics of networking.  No system stands alone these days, and it is essential to know the medium you use to access machines.  We will not go into the low level bits and bytes, but keep it to the essentials.  So, even if you know this stuff, please read through it if only to refresh your memory.

      Infrastructure architecture - LAN/WAN/WLAN

      Computers are used to generate data. From its inception, the output of computers were the reason for using one. And with the generation of information, storing and sharing become key. Thus the birth of networking.

      ARPANET

      [1]ARPANET was the world's first packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The network was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US DOD for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories. The packet switching of the ARPANET was based on designs by Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory.

      Packet switching was a new concept at that time. Prior to the advent of packet switching, both voice and data communications had been based on the idea of circuit switching, as in the traditional telephone circuit, wherein each telephone call is allocated a dedicated, end-to-end, electronic connection between the two communicating stations. Such stations might be telephones or computers. The dedicated line is typically composed of many intermediary lines which are assembled into a chain that stretches all the way from the originating station to the destination station.

      With packet switching, a data system could use a single communications link to communicate with more than one machine by collecting data into data-grams and transmitting these as packets onto the attached network link. Thus, not only can the link be shared, much as a single post box can be used to post letters to different destinations, but each packet can be routed independently of other packets.

      The Internet

      PIPES, ADDRESSES, PORTS

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