Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Eric Raymond After a brief introduction in the first post ”what is a hacker?” we will focus on the different skills a Computer Hacker should have. Hacking – Chapter 2 – Skills wargames Purpose A computer hacker has to understand how a computer system works and know what tools to employ in order to find a security weakness. So we are talking about Penetration Testing (Pen Testing) here. To be clear a Hacker will try to breach a computer system security. And ‘Security’ can be categorized as Confidentiality (Steal data) Authenticity (Address spoofing) Integrity (Data alteration) Availability (DoS attack) And to do so chummer you will need some skills. And it will be cool if you can master some of them to understand what you are doing and not to be one of these script kiddie 🙂 Skill set (Basic) Skills I put some links. For the most curious just go to your public library or search in your favourite web browser ;p Computer Programming Every software/ Apps/ video game / connected item you use contains code. So you need to understand it and you need to learn different languages like Python, Java, C, C++ Wanna learn by yourself? (Click on the pic) codecademy WEB and HTML WEB? Internet? Websites? Please:) You have a a huge playground here. And every website is created with code also.So you need to to know how to read the page source. View PageSource The most well known site to learn is w3schools Computer Networking First sentence of Wikipedia: A computer network or data network is a telecommunications network that allows computers to exchange data. In computer networks, networked computing devices pass data to each other along data connections. Computer Networking So if you want to have access to these data or just want to protect yours it is good to know how it works. Basic technologies and protocols DHCP NAT Subnetting IPv4 IPv6 Public v Private IP DNS Routers and switches VLANs OSI model MAC addressing ARP Wireless technologies Wooosh yeah! So many subjects about this one too 🙂 So definitely books are your best friends but if you want to start easy with user friendly videos have a check on YouTube and follow these channels: TheNewBoston and start with this one: Computer Networking Tutorial – 1 – What is a Computer Network? I also like Eli the computer guy‘s videos : Introduction to DHCP Operating systems Operating Systems Windows (According to the National Vulnerability Database, Microsoft operating systems have a large number of vulnerabilities. Seriously? ;p) Unix/ Linux iOS With this base you will have a deeper understanding of your environment and know more about the tools you will use. Hope you enjoyed this second chapter and stay tuned for the next one! If you have any questions or remarks, feel free to comment. A final question for you guys: What kind of skills or knowledge you think a Hacker needs?
