Ethical Hacking: A Hands-on Introduction to Breaking In

A hands-on guide to hacking computer systems from the ground up, from capturing traffic to crafting sneaky, successful trojans. A crash course in modern hacking techniques, Ethical Hacking is already being used to prepare the next generation of offensive security experts. In its many hands-on labs, youll explore crucial skills for any aspiring penetration tester, security researcher, or malware analyst. Youll begin with the basics: capturing a victims network traffic with an ARP spoofing attack and then viewing it in Wireshark. From there, youll deploy reverse shells that let you remotely run commands on a victims computer, encrypt files by writing your own ransomware in Python, and fake emails like the ones used in phishing attacks. In advanced chapters, youll learn how to fuzz for new vulnerabilities, craft trojans and rootkits, exploit websites with SQL injection, and escalate your privileges to extract credentials, which youll use to traverse a private network. Youll work with a wide range of professional penetration testing toolsand learn to write your own tools in Pythonas you practice tasks like: Deploying the Metasploit frameworks reverse shells and embedding them in innocent-seeming files Capturing passwords in a corporate Windows network using Mimikatz Scanning (almost) every device on the internet to find potential victims Installing Linux rootkits that modify a victims operating system Performing advanced Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that execute sophisticated JavaScript payloads Along the way, youll gain a foundation in the relevant computing technologies. Discover how advanced fuzzers work behind the scenes, learn how internet traffic gets encrypted, explore the inner mechanisms of nation-state malware like Drovorub, and much more. Developed with feedback from cybersecurity students, Ethical Hacking addresses contemporary issues in the field not often covered in other books and will prepare you for a career in penetration testing. Most importantly, youll be able to think like an ethical hacker: someone who can carefully analyze systems and creatively gain access to them.