GET STARTED WITH ETHICAL HACKING

This guide is all about how to become an ethical hacker. It includes detailed information on the role an ethical hacker plays, some of the skills and experience necessary to become an ethical hacker, and strategies for landing a job as an ethical hacker.

An ethical hacker’s primary purpose is to view security from the adversary’s perspective in an effort to find vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors. This provides defensive teams the opportunity to mitigate by devising a patch before a real attack can occur. This objective is served by executing simulated cyberattacks in a controlled environment.

Role of an ethical hacker

Ethical hackers can be independent freelance consultants, employed by a firm that specializes in simulated offensive cybersecurity services, or they can be an in-house employee protecting a company’s website or apps.

The skills required to become an ethical hacker?

Ethics are what separate the good guys from the bad guys. There are plenty of blackhat hackers that have adequate technical skills to be an ethical hacker, but they lack the discipline of character to do the right thing regardless of the perceived benefits of doing otherwise.?

• To become an ethical hacker a candidate must understand networks, both wired and wireless.
• They must be proficient with operating systems, especially Windows and Linux.
• They need to understand firewalls and file systems.
• They must know how file permissions work and be familiar with servers, workstations, and computer science generally.?
• Strong coding skills are essential and direct, manual, and hands-on attack methods must be clearly understood and demonstrated.

In short, an ethical hacker should have defended so many assets over their career that imitating and then thinking a few steps ahead of the adversary comes almost as second nature.

Above all of these an ethical hacker must have good ethics and strong technical skills is a special mix of creative and analytical thinking.

Books recommended to get prior knowledge

1. Hacking for Dummies:?The “for dummies” series of Wiley focuses on publishing beginner-friendly books on various topics. This book introduces the user to ethical hacking through concepts and tools. It is very useful for people who want to start learning ethical hacking but are not very comfortable with programming. This should however be understood that being an elite hacker is almost impossible without learning to program.

2. CEHv10 Study Guide by SYBEX:?This book is aimed to aid the preparation of CEH(Certified Ethical Hacker), a popular certification course in ethical hacking. It explains the ethical hacking methodology and the phases of it. Each phase of ethical hacking is well explained with details of the concepts and practice on the tools.

3. Hacking, The Art of Exploitation :This book has been very popular in the community of white hat hackers for a long time. Probably because of the content it covers and the depth it goes into. The good thing about this book is that even if you are a novice with absolutely no knowledge about programming and networks, you can still benefit immensely. The book covers Basic Programming in C, Scripting with Bash, basics of memory management in computers, filesystems, overflow based vulnerabilities and their exploitation, basic networking, attacks on networks, writing shell-code, and cryptology.

How to gain experience as an ethical hacker

Becoming familiar and comfortable with vulnerability testing tools like Metasploit , OpenVAS and Nessus is very necessary for an ethical hacker.

?These or similar tools may provide a useful framework for vulnerability scanning and management but should represent only the starting point for an experienced ethical hacker. Manual simulated attacks must be directed toward the target as well.

Knowledge and experience related to how these attacks are performed are essential.?

• Practice solving vulnerable machines from Vulnhub and Hack The Box to gain basic to advance idea about the vulnerabilities in an system or network.
• After doing the vulnerable machines , you can start with bug bounty platforms to practice real life scenarios .

You will find it a bit difficult in starting when you perform hacking on real environments from bug bounty platforms.

Don't get demotivated with that. This is normal because machines you practiced was made vulnerable but real websites try every possible way to make it secure.