Almost everyone in this growing digital world has heard the word hacking at least once. And different hacking incidents happening around the world have made people more curious and conscious about it. Also, nowadays, many hacking movies are also playing very important roles in spreading awareness about hacking. But the problem is that very few people know about hacking, and the majority of them don’t know how to learn it. Don’t worry! Through this ethical hacking tutorial, will help you to understand some of the basic things about hacking. You can also take up a free ethical hacking course online that will help you kickstart your ethical hacking journey.
To learn more such concepts, you can also upskill with Great Learning’s Advanced Cybersecurity Program and accelerate your career in Cybersecurity. Gain skills required to protect networks, secure electronic assets, prevent attacks, ensure the privacy of your customers, and build a secure infrastructure.
- What is Ethical Hacking?
- Types of Hacking
- Types of Hackers
- Ethical Hacking Tools
- Programming Languages
Let’s begin the ethical hacking tutorial with a very basic but important question:
What is Ethical Hacking?
We can define hacking as a simple process of finding vulnerabilities in a system. Ethical hacking is a legal version of hacking, and ethical hackers are computer security specialists who hack into the system with the permission of the owner/admin.
Let’s understand it with the help of an example:- Consider you have created any new application like Twitter, and within a small interval, you’ve gained a lot of different users who can access your application. Now imagine your application is hacked, and your app slows down or has some anonymous behaviour.
At this time, you’ll need to hire a team of ethical hackers to find out the vulnerabilities or say loopholes in your application to prevent it from such attacks in the future. Such vulnerabilities sometimes can cost organizations their valuable data, hard-earned image, or even millions of dollars. That’s the reason back in the 1970s, and big corporations started hiring ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities in their systems to protect them from malicious attacks. It is time to know about types of hacking.
Types of Hacking
There are many different types of hacking and some of them are mentioned below:
- Email hacking
- Website hacking
- Password hacking
- Computer hacking
- Network hacking
1) Email hacking
This kind of hacking activity is done by numerous types, and hackers use this to perform various illegal actions. After hacking, hackers use that email without the authentication of the owner.
2) Website hacking
When hackers take full control over a server, database, or website, they can change any information and setting of the website, and this is something called website hacking. It happened once with me also. My website is called inquisitor. Xyz was once hacked by a hacker, and I had to do many small things to get it back.
3) Password hacking
It is something called restoring/recovering passwords from the data that is stored in some local computer.
4) Computer Hacking
When some hacker takes access to your computer and system and can manipulate and steal data from your device, the numbers of computer hacking are increasing year by year.
5) Network Hacking
Sometimes when hackers want to harm the network system, they try to access that network using different tools. Tracert and NS lookup are some of these tools.
Now, we know some types of hacking, it will be interesting to know about some different kinds of hackers.
Types of Hackers
- White Hat
- Grey Hat
- Black Hat
- Miscellaneous
Let’s discuss each of them:
White Hat Hackers:
Ethical hackers are known as white hat hackers. As we discussed, they are good software engineers and always try to find vulnerabilities in the network system as part of testing and vulnerability assessments to identify security flaws in the system.
Black Hat Hackers:
Black Hat Hackers are exactly the opposite of white hat hackers. Black as it is clear from the name itself, keep themselves in the dark and then try to get access over different computer devices and data. They always hack unauthorised systems to steal important data, build false network communication, and damage the system.
Grey-Hat Hackers:
They are a combination of both white and grey hat hackers. They hack the system only for fun and try to find vulnerabilities and flaws in the system and then they bring it to the attention of the owner and in return, they get appreciation from the owners. Most of the time they get paid after informing about such flaws.
Miscellaneous hackers:
These hackers do different hacking activities and based on that, they are called:
- Elite Hackers
- Blue hat Hackers
- Script Kiddie
- Hacktivist
- Red hat hackers
- Neophyte
You now know about different types of hacking and hackers. It is time you should know about some of the important tools that are used to do these hackings.
Ethical Hacking Tools
- Netsparker
- Metasploit
- Nmap
- John the ripper
- Burp Suite
1) Netsparker
It is software that is widely used to detect existing vulnerabilities in web applications, and it’ll report to you in full detail, including suggestions related to solutions. Netsparker always helps you to fight the talent gap in cybersecurity and fully automate web security processes. Moreover, it contributes to prioritizing solving problems by performing automatic vulnerability assessments. Also, you can automatically discover and protect your existing web assets. And with the help of Netsparker, you can avoid resource-intensive manual processes.
Also, it not only detects vulnerabilities thanks to its unique scanning technologies but also provides evidence that these vulnerabilities actually exist. Therefore, you do not have to check the accuracy of the results Netsparker provides to you. And it’ll save most of your time doing these things.
2) Metasploit
This Ruby-based framework is a very powerful and useful tool for hackers. As it is open-source, anyone can use it, and it keeps on improving.
1) It helps you to take advantage of the weakness of the system.
2) With the help of Metasploit, you can do deeper penetration and easily find all flaws of the system.
There are a number of modules in Metasploit that make it more powerful, and with the use of these modules, hackers can easily get access to the system. Some of these modules are:
- Exploit
- Auxiliary functions
- Encoders
- Shellcode
- Playloads
- Nops
- Post-exploitation code
- Listeners
3) Nmap
Nmap( Network Mapper ) is also an open-source tool that was mainly designed to scan large networks. Nmap is like gold for Network Administrators, and they use it to accomplish many tasks such as security auditing, version detection, Os detection, network discovery, etc.
4) John the ripper
Hackers mostly use John, the ripper, whenever they need to crack the password while penetrating testing. It is one of the most useful tools for hacking.
5) Burp Suite
‘Burp’ is a proxy tool used to evaluate the security and hands-on testing of web browsers.
It is one of the most used penetrating testing tools, and it is mostly used to check the security of web applications (from mapping to analyzing).
As of now, you have learned about some most useful tools for hacking. But this is not the end. In this ethical hacking tutorial, you’ll also learn about some of the programming languages that will help you to learn ethical hacking.
Programming Languages
| Language | Description Purpose |
| HTML | For creating web pages This markup language helps you to enter data all over the internet that can help you to find and analyze vulnerabilities in the system and security code |
| Javascript | Scripted language of This scripted language is |
| client-side that is used for execution on the client backend service browser and helps you in saving cookies and other inputs, etc. | |
| PHP/Ruby | Server Side scripting It is one of the most used programming languages and it helps in modifying other settings on the browsers. Also, it makes the server vulnerable to attacks. |
| Bash SQL | Creating handy scripts It comes in handy when you and bash file need to write your shellcodes, exploits, or understand/expand on the existing ones. Used for interaction with You can use it to bypass database web applications login algorithms that are usually weak. |
Operating systems that you can use to perform such activities are Windows, Linux, & Mac OS. Some of the securities such as cryptography, encryption, fireworks, decryption, SSL, HTTP, HTTPS, IPsec, etc.
Now you are pretty much good to go to learn ethical hacking and explore it your way. In today’s world, the requirements of ethical hackers are increasing rapidly. I hope this ethical hacking tutorial might help you in starting your journey in the field of ethical hacking, and you can do wonders in this domain.
