Ethical hacking learning pdf

EtherPeek is a small tool less than 2 MB that can be easily installed in a matter of few minutes. EtherPeek proactively sniffs traffic packets on a network. QualysGuard QualysGuard is an integrated suite of tools that can be utilized to simplify security operations and lower the cost of compliance. It delivers critical security intelligence on demand and automates the full spectrum of auditing, compliance and protection for IT systems and web applications. QualysGuard includes a set of tools that can monitor, detect, and protect your global network.

WebInspect WebInspect is a web application security assessment tool that helps identify known and unknown vulnerabilities within the Web application layer. It can also help check that a Web server is configured properly, and attempts common web attacks such as parameter injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, and more.

It is a password auditing and recovery application. It is used to test password strength and sometimes to recover lost Microsoft Windows passwords, by using dictionary, brute-force, and hybrid attacks. LC4 recovers Windows user account passwords to streamline migration of users to another authentication system or to access accounts whose passwords are lost.

You can obtain information about each individual operating system. It can also detect registry issues and have a report set up in HTML format. For each computer, you can list the netbios name table, current logged-on user, and Mac address.

It allows network professionals to detect WLANs. It is widely used by networking enthusiasts and hackers because it helps you find non-broadcasting wireless networks.

Network Stumbler can be used to verify if a network is well configured, its signal strength or coverage, and detect interference between one or more wireless networks.

It can also be used to non-authorized connections. War dialling is a technique of using a modem to automatically scan a list of telephone numbers, usually dialling every number in a local area code. Malicious hackers use the resulting lists in breaching computer security - for guessing user accounts, or locating modems that might provide an entry-point into computer or other electronic systems.

Like any other expertise, you need to put a lot of effort in order to acquire knowledge and become an expert hacker. Once you are on the track, you would need more effort to keep up-to-date with latest technologies, new vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques. A good ethical hacker has great problem-solving skills too. Final Note You need to stay as a White Hat Hacker which means you need to work within given boundaries.

Never intrude or attack any computer or network without a required permission from the authorities. As a final note, it is highly recommended that you refrain from engaging yourself in black hat hacking which may spoil your entire career. It helps hackers to make a structured ethical hacking attack. Different security training manuals explain the process of ethical hacking in different ways, but for me as a Certified Ethical Hacker, the entire process can be categorized into the following six phases.

Ethical Hacking Process Reconnaissance Reconnaissance is the phase where the attacker gathers information about a target using active or passive means. Gaining Access In this process, the vulnerability is located and you attempt to exploit it in order to enter into the system. The primary tool that is used in this process is Metasploit. Maintaining Access It is the process where the hacker has already gained access into a system. After gaining access, the hacker installs some backdoors in order to enter into the system when he needs access in this owned system in future.

Metasploit is the preferred tool in this process. Clearing Tracks This process is actually an unethical activity. It has to do with the deletion of logs of all the activities that take place during the hacking process. Reporting Reporting is the last step of finishing the ethical hacking process. Here the Ethical Hacker compiles a report with his findings and the job that was done such as the tools used, the success rate, vulnerabilities found, and the exploit processes.

Quick Tip The processes are not standard. You can adopt a set of different processes and tools according to your techniques that you are comfortable with.

The process is of least significance as long as you are able to get the desired results. Reconnaissance takes place in two parts: Active Reconnaissance and Passive Reconnaissance. Active Reconnaissance In this process, you will directly interact with the computer system to gain information. This information can be relevant and accurate. But there is a risk of getting detected if you are planning active reconnaissance without permission. If you are detected, then system admin can take severe action against you and trail your subsequent activities.

Passive Reconnaissance In this process, you will not be directly connected to a computer system. This process is used to gather essential information without ever interacting with the target systems. Footprinting could be both passive and active. Footprinting is basically the first step where hacker gathers as much information as possible to find ways to intrude into a target system or at least decide what type of attacks will be more suitable for the target.

This command is available on Windows as well as on Linux OS. Following is the example to find out the IP address of tutorialspoint. Following is the example to find out the details of an IP address: Here the ISP row gives you the detail about the hosting company because IP addresses are usually provided by hosting companies only.

If you have a server containing very sensitive data, then it is recommended to keep it behind a secure proxy so that hackers cannot get the exact details of your actual server.

This way, it will be difficult for any potential hacker to reach your server directly. IP Address Ranges Small sites may have a single IP address associated with them, but larger websites usually have multiple IP addresses serving different domains and sub-domains.

You can enter company name in the highlighted search box to find out a list of all the assigned IP addresses to that company. History of the Website It is very easy to get a complete history of any website using www. You can enter a domain name in the search box to find out how the website was looking at a given point of time and what were the pages available on the website on different dates.

In the following section, we have given an example to explain how you can use NMAP tool to detect the OS of a target domain. Based on the sniffer traces such as Wireshark of the packets, you can determine the operating system of the remote host.

By analyzing these factors of a packet, you may be able to determine the remote operating system. Basic Steps Before attacking a system, it is required that you know what operating system is hosting a website. Once a target OS is known, then it becomes easy to determine which vulnerabilities might be present to exploit the target system. Below is a simple nmap command which can be used to identify the operating system serving a website and all the opened ports associated with the domain name, i.

Quick Fix You can hide your main system behind a secure proxy server or a VPN so that your complete identity is safe and ultimately your main system remains safe. Port Scanning We have just seen information given by nmap command. This command lists down all the open ports on a given server. Quick Fix It is always recommended to check and close all the unwanted ports to safeguard the system from malicious attacks. You can use fping command for ping sweep. This can be done using the following command which will create a firewall rule in iptable.

In fact, it is like a distributed database which is used to translate an IP address DNS enumeration is the process of locating all the DNS servers and their corresponding records for an organization. The idea is to gather as much interesting details as possible about your target before initiating an attack.

You can use nslookup command available on Linux to get DNS and host-related information. Preventing DNS Enumeration is a big challenge. If your DNS is not configured in a secure way, it is possible that lots of sensitive information about the network and organization can go outside and an untrusted Internet user can perform a DNS zone transfer. It is also called wiretapping applied to the computer networks. There is so much possibility that if a set of enterprise switch ports is open, then one of their employees can sniff the whole traffic of the network.

Anyone in the same physical location can plug into the network using Ethernet cable or connect wirelessly to that network and sniff the total traffic. In other words, Sniffing allows you to see all sorts of traffic, both protected and unprotected.

In the right conditions and with the right protocols in place, an attacking party may be able to gather information that can be used for further attacks or to cause other issues for the network or system owner. What can be sniffed? Promiscuous mode refers to the unique way of Ethernet hardware, in particular, network interface cards NICs , that allows an NIC to receive all traffic on the network, even if it is not addressed to this NIC.

By default, a NIC ignores all traffic that is not addressed to it, which is done by comparing the destination address of the Ethernet packet with the hardware address a. MAC of the device. While this makes perfect sense for networking, non-promiscuous mode makes it difficult to use network monitoring and analysis software for diagnosing connectivity issues or traffic accounting. Switch Internet Sniffing the networks A sniffer can continuously monitor all the traffic to a computer through the NIC by decoding the information encapsulated in the data packets.

Types of Sniffing Sniffing can be either Active or Passive in nature. Passive Sniffing In passive sniffing, the traffic is locked but it is not altered in any way. Passive sniffing allows listening only. It works with Hub devices. On a hub device, the traffic is sent to all the ports. In a network that uses hubs to connect systems, all hosts on the network can see the traffic. Therefore, an attacker can easily capture traffic going through.

The good news is that hubs are almost obsolete nowadays. Most modern networks use switches. Hence, passive sniffing is no more effective. Active Sniffing In active sniffing, the traffic is not only locked and monitored, but it may also be altered in some way as determined by the attack. Active sniffing is used to sniff a switch-based network.

It involves injecting address resolution packets ARP into a target network to flood on the switch content addressable memory CAM table. CAM keeps track of which host is connected to which port. This protocol is efficient, but it does not include any protection against sniffing. This protocol does not include protection against sniffing because it can be trapped.

All the data is sent as clear text that can be easily sniffed. Sniffers are not the dumb utilities that allow you to view only live traffic. If you really want to analyze each packet, save the capture and review it whenever time allows.

Hardware Protocol Analyzers Before we go into further details of sniffers, it is important that we discuss about hardware protocol analyzers. These devices plug into the network at the hardware level and can monitor traffic without manipulating it.

These hardware devices are not readily available to most ethical hackers due to their enormous cost in many cases. LI must always be in pursuance of a lawful authority for the purpose of analysis or evidence. Therefore, LI is a security process in which a network operator or service provider gives law enforcement officials permission to access private communications of individuals or organizations.

Almost all countries have drafted and enacted legislation to regulate lawful interception procedures; standardization groups are creating LI technology specifications. Usually, LI activities are taken for the purpose of infrastructure protection and cyber security.

However, operators of private network infrastructures can maintain LI capabilities within their own networks as an inherent right, unless otherwise prohibited. LI was formerly known as wiretapping and has existed since the inception of electronic communications. Sniffing tools are extremely common applications.

It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols and includes many features for network and host analysis. It offers a tremendous number of features designed to assist in the dissection and analysis of traffic.

Available at www. Dsniff is designed for Unix and Linux platforms and does not have a full equivalent on the Windows platform. This tool is used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. A potential hacker can use any of these sniffing tools to analyze traffic on a network and dissect information. What is ARP Spoofing? Attackers flood a target computer ARP cache with forged entries, which is also known as poisoning.

ARP poisoning uses Man-in-the-Middle access to poison the network. What is MITM? In this case, the victims think that they are communicating with each other, but in reality, the malicious actor controls the communication.

Some protocols such as SSL serve to prevent this type of attack. You can perform this attack in local LAN. Step 3: Make sure you are connected to local LAN and check the IP address by typing the command ifconfig in the terminal.

It will start scanning the whole network for the alive hosts. This list also includes the default gateway address. We have to be careful when we select the targets. Step 8: Now we have to choose the targets. In MITM, our target is the host machine, and the route will be the router address to forward the traffic. In an MITM attack, the attacker intercepts the network and sniffs the packets. So we will add target 1 as victim IP and target 2 as router IP.

You can see the results in the toolbar of Ettercap. This is how sniffing works. ARP Poisoning has the potential to cause huge losses in company environments. This is the place where ethical hackers are appointed to secure the networks. In the next chapter, we will discuss another type of attack known as DNS poisoning. An attacker can create fake DNS entries for the server which may contain malicious content with the same name.

For instance, a user types www. As we understand, DNS poisoning is used to redirect the users to fake pages which are managed by the attackers. To initiate DNS poisoning, you have to start with ARP poisoning, which we have already discussed in the previous chapter.

We will use DNS spoof plugin which is already there in Ettercap. This file contains all entries for DNS addresses which is used by Ettercap to resolve the domain name addresses. If someone wants to open Facebook, he will be redirected to another website.

See the following example: Step 3: Now save this file and exit by saving the file. Step 4: After this, the whole process is same to start ARP poisoning. It means the user gets the Google page instead of facebook.

In this exercise, we saw how network traffic can be sniffed through different tools and methods. Here a company needs an ethical hacker to provide network security to stop all these attacks. Defenses against DNS Poisoning As an ethical hacker, your work could very likely put you in a position of prevention rather than pen testing.

What you know as an attacker can help you prevent the very techniques you employ from the outside. Summary In this chapter, we discussed how attackers can capture and analyze all the traffic by placing a packet sniffer in a network. With a real-time example, we saw how easy it is to get the credentials of a victim from a given network. Metasploit is a powerful tool to locate vulnerabilities in a system.

Based on the vulnerabilities, we find exploits. Here, we will discuss some of the best vulnerability search engines that you can use. Exploit Database www. CVE is a dictionary of publicly known information security vulnerabilities and exposures. This data enables automation of vulnerability management, security measurement, and compliance. Hackers use remote exploits to gain access to systems that are located at remote places.

Quick Fix Vulnerabilities generally arise due to missing updates, so it is recommended that you update your system on a regular basis, for example, once a week.

In Linux Centos, you can use the following command to install automatic update package. This is a process where the attacker establishes an active connection with the victim and try to discover as much attack vectors as possible, which can be used to exploit the systems further. This is important because in a network environment, you can find other primary servers that help the hosts to update their times and you can do it without authenticating the system.

Take a look at the following example. Take a look at the following screenshot and observe how we have found the usernames present in a target host. Take a look at the following screenshot to understand how it does so. It reduces the possibilities of OS enumeration of the services that your systems are running. It comes in two versions: commercial and free edition.

There are no major differences in the two versions, so in this tutorial, we will be mostly using the Community version free of Metasploit.

Highlighted in red underline is the version of Metasploit. Now, we will use the exploit that can work for us. If the exploit is successful, then it will open one session that you can interact with, as shown in the following screenshot.

Metasploit Payloads Payload, in simple terms, are simple scripts that the hackers utilize to interact with a hacked system. Using payloads, they can transfer data to a victim system. For example, just creating a user. The various payload stages provide advanced features with no size limits such as Meterpreter and VNC Injection. It will create a session as shown below: Now we can play with the system according to the settings that this payload offers. They operate without the permissions or knowledge of the computer users.

Trojans hide themselves in healthy processes. However we should underline that Trojans infect outside machines only with the assistance of a computer user, like clicking a file that comes attached with email from an unknown person, plugging USB without scanning, opening unsafe URLs.

Hackers can use these backdoors to access a victim system and its files. A hacker can use Trojans to edit and delete the files present on a victim system, or to observe the activities of the victim. These are called Trojan-Banker. These are Ransomware Trojans. These are called SMS Trojans. Trojan Information If you have found a virus and want to investigate further regarding its function, then we will recommend that you have a look at the following virus databases, which are offered generally by antivirus vendors.

It is done in order to bypass the password authentication which is normally the start of a session. For sniffing, we use tools like Wireshark or Ethercap. When the hacker discovers the IP of one of the users, he can put down the connection of the other user by DoS attack and then resume communication by spoofing the IP of the disconnected user. Or, you should use double authentication techniques to keep the session secured.

It works by using the following three techniques which are email spoofing, social engineering tools, or inserting viruses in a user computer. Email Spoofing In email spoofing, the spammer sends emails from a known domain, so the receiver thinks that he knows this person and opens the mail. Such mails normally contain suspicious links, doubtful content, requests to transfer money, etc.

Social Engineering Spammers send promotional mails to different users, offering huge discount and tricking them to fill their personal data. You have tools available in Kali that can drive you to hijack an email. See the following screenshot. Inserting Viruses in a User System The third technique by which a hacker can hijack your email account is by infecting your system with a virus or any other kind of malware.

With the help of a virus, a hacker can take all your passwords. How to detect if your email has been hijacked? Ethical Hacking — Password Hacking Ethical Hacking We have passwords for emails, databases, computer systems, servers, bank accounts, and virtually everything that we want to protect.

Passwords are in general the keys to get access into a system or an account. In general, people tend to set passwords that are easy to remember, such as their date of birth, names of family members, mobile numbers, etc. This is what makes the passwords weak and prone to easy hacking. One should always take care to have a strong password to defend their accounts from potential hackers. Dictionary Attack In a dictionary attack, the hacker uses a predefined list of words from a dictionary to try and guess the password.

If the set password is weak, then a dictionary attack can decode it quite fast. There are very few sites to learn hacking tutorials in the video format and this one clearly holds its place in the list of best ethical hacking learning websites.

Hacker is an educational platform developed by HackerOne, to deliver free classes for web security and ethical hacking. Submitted On: Learn Ethical Hacking From Scratch Become an ethical hacker that can hack computer systems like black hat hackers and secure them like security experts.

Bestseller Rating: 4. Welcome this comprehensive Ethical Hacking course! First, you will learn network basics, how they work, and how devices communicate with each other. Then it will branch into three sub sections:. Gaining Access — In this section you will learn two main approaches to gain full control or hack computer systems :. Post Exploitation — In this section you will learn how to interact with the systems you compromised so far.

At the end of each section you will learn how to detect, prevent and secure systems and yourself from the discussed attacks. Skip to content. Description Welcome this comprehensive Ethical Hacking course!

The course is divided into four main sections: 1. Gaining Access: Now that you gathered information about the networks around you, in this subsection you will learn how to crack the key and get the password to your target network weather it uses WEP, WPA or even WPA2. Post Connection attacks: Now that you have the key, you can connect to the target network, in this subsection you will learn a number of powerful techniques that allow you to gather comprehensive information about the connected devices, see anything they do on the internet such as login information, passwords , visited urls, images, videos ….