Alphy Books - Hacking: Hacking With Python - The Complete Beginners Course to Learn Ethical Hacking With Python in 7 Clear-Cut Lessons - Including Dozens of Practical Examples & Exercises (Hacking Series Book 1)

These days, it normally goes without saying that digital security is extremely important. And, most users, most of the time, take for granted that their information is safe in the hands of the people who manage their sensitive digital activities: e-banking sites, online stores, private messages, social networks, and so on. And, of course, there is no reason to worry about the information that remains safely on our own computers. But every few months, there will be a new rash of reminders about how important digital security really is and how careful we should always be with our data.

The reason why something that normally goes without saying is so often actually said is that, even though we all understand that the security of our computer systems is crucial, we have reached a point where most of us tend to expect that the security we need has already been built into the systems we use by people who know what they are doing. This would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that, even for people who know what they are doing, implementing strong security systems is a very difficult task. For one, it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to predict all of the possible means that unauthorized individuals could use to try to break into a system. For every exploitable feature that is identified and fixed, a dozen more may be introduced without anyone realizing it. More fundamentally, though, strong security is difficultand perfect security is impossiblebecause, in order for a system to be useful, there needs to be some way for authorized users to get in. A building with no doors or windows is perfectly secure; it is also completely worthless as a building. Sometimes, just having a front door is all that it takes to give the wrong people a way inside. More concretely, any computer system, be it an operating system, a web app, or anything else, is all but guaranteed to have features that can be leveraged to do things that the creators of the system did not intend. The people who know how to search for and exploit these vulnerabilities are called hackers.

To put a very simple, concrete definition to the term, hacking is the act of gaining access to computer systems that you are not supposed to have access to. And, whether your intention is to become a hacker yourself or to develop methods to keep hackers out of your own systems, you are going to need to learn how to think like a hacker. This book is designed to help you do that.

To clarify some terminology that you are likely to encounter as you learn more about this subject, I am going to take a moment to talk about hats. You will hear people describe others (or even self-identify) as white hat , black hat , or gray hat hackers. This distinction is a reference to the early days of cinemawesterns, in particularwhen the audience could easily tell which characters were the good guys and which were the bad guys simply by the color of the hats they were wearingthe good guys always wore white, the bad guys always wore black. In the context of hacking, this provides a reasonably useful way to broadly categorize the huge variety of activities that could all be considered to be forms of hacking.

First of all, black hat hacking is the type that is most often talked about, and it is what most people think of when they hear the term hacker . You probably already have a decent idea of what this can includestealing financial and personal information, taking down web servers, and so onbut, in general, black hat hacking can be characterized as any kind of hacking that breaks rules and generally leaves their targets worse off than they were before. White hat hacking, on the other hand, is done with good intentions. Most often, this means penetration testing (often shortened to pentesting ) in which a hacker is hired or volunteers to attempt to break into a clients systems in order to locate potential security flaws. It is not uncommon for large software companies to offer rewards to hackers who warn them of vulnerabilities in their products as a supplement to their own internal security testing. Finally, gray hat hacking encompasses anything that does not fit comfortably into either of the other hats. This could be taken to mean just about anything, but most commonly refers to things like reverse-engineering and software cracking, which are often seen as ethically questionable but not detrimental to the target in the same way that a black hat hack, like stealing a servers worth of customers personal data, might be. If you are trying to learn more about a subject, narrowing it down to one of those categories is a decent way to start your search.