Sanjib Sinha - Beginning Ethical Hacking with Python

Sanjib Sinha 2017

Sanjib Sinha 1

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Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this chapter (doi: 10.1007/978-1-4842-2541-7_1 ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

As time goes by and we progress, our old environment is also changing very fast. It has not been like before when we keep records by entering data into a big logbook and stack them one by one date-wise. Now we keep data in a computer. We dont go to a market anymore to buy anything. We order it over the Internet and payment is made by using credit or debit card . The nature of crime has also changed accordingly.

Criminals used to snatch your data physically before. They now snatch it over the Internet using computers. Now computers have become a new tool for business as well as for traditional crimes. On the basis of which, a termcyberlaw comes to the fore. As an ethical hacker, the first and most basic thing you should remember is dont try to penetrate or tamper any other system without asking permission.

You may ask how I would experiment with my knowledge. The answer is Virtual Box . In your virtual machine you may install as many operating systems as you want and experiment on them (The above image depicts Virtual Box and two operating systems running in it). Try everything on them. Trying any virus on your virtual machine will not affect your main system. At the same time you will keep learning about malware, viruses and every kind of possible attack.

A few examples may give you an idea what type of computer crimes are punishable in our legal system.

If you use any software tool to generate a credit card or debit card number , then it is a highly punishable offense. It will invite a fine of fifty thousand dollars and fifteen years of imprisonment. Setting up a bogus web site to take credit card numbers with a false promise of selling non-existent products is a highly punishable offense. Rigorous imprisonment and a hefty fine follow. I can give you several other examples that may invite trouble for you if you dont stay within the law.

Remember, you are an ethical hacker and you are learning hacking tools for protecting your or your clients system. For the sake of protection and defense, you need to know the attack, exploit or penetration methods .

Try every single experiment on your virtual machine.

That is the rule number one of ethical hacking.

Sanjib Sinha 2017

Sanjib Sinha 1

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The very first thing that you need is a virtual machine . As I said before, I have Ubuntu as my default operating system and inside my virtual machine I have installed two operating systemsone is Windows XP and the other is Kali Linux.

Technically, from now on I would mention Windows XP and Kali Linux as my virtual machines. Kali Linux is a Linux distribution that comes up with many useful hacking tools. So I strongly suggest using it as your virtual machine. You may also read the documentation page of Kali Linux, which will also be an immense help.

At the same time, Id not suggest using Windows of any kind for the ethical hacking purpose. Some may argue that few hacking tools can be used in Windows, so why you are suggesting otherwise? The point is: in the ethical hacking world, you need to be anonymous all the time. You wont want to keep your trail, anyway, so that you can be traced back. Remaining anonymous is a big challenge. In Linux it is fairly easy and you can stay anonymous for the time being.

Keeping that in mind, I explain that technique of being anonymous in great detail so that before jumping up into the big task, you make your defense much stronger. Being anonymous is the most important thing in the world of ethical hacking. Keeping yourself anonymous in Windows is not possible. So it is better to adapt to the Linux environment first. Another important thing is, most of the great hacking tools are not available in the Windows environment.

If you have never heard of any Linux distribution , dont worry. You can either install user-friendly Ubuntu inside your Windows system or you can easily partition your disk into two parts and install Ubuntu and Windows separately as your two default operating systems. It is preferable to do the latter. Installing and uninstalling parallel operating systems always teaches you something new. If you are familiar with Windows, I wont tell you to simply dump it for the sake of learning ethical hacking. You can keep it and use it for your daily work. There is no problem in doing this.

In the Internet world, Linux is used more. So you need to learn a few Linux commands. Software installation in Linux is slightly different from Windows environments. There are Linux distributions like Fedora or Debian, and many more. I named Ubuntu just because it is extremely popular and Windows users find themselves comfortable inside it. The operations are more or less the same, including the software installations. For beginners, it is not a good idea to install Kali Linux as your default OS. You must read Kali documentation, where it is clearly stated that Kali is more for developers. You are going to install it inside your Virtual Box. Kali Linux is a kind of Linux distribution that comes with lot of hacking tools. You need to know them and use them in the course of ethical hacking.

Installing Virtual Machine is a very important step as the first step of building your environment. In the next chapter I will show you how you can do that for different operating systems. Another important thing is learning a programming language that will really help you learn ethical hacking better.

The obvious choice is Python . At the time of writing this book, Python 3.x has already arrived and is considered the future of this language. It is very quickly catching up with the old Python 2.x version, which has been around the market for a while. The official Python download page provides the repository of Python installers for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. If you download an installer, it is of immense help because it comes with the Python interpreter, standard library, and standard modules. The standard library and built-in modules are specifically very important because they offer you several useful capabilities that will help you achieve your goal as an ethical hacker. Among the useful modules, you will get cryptographic services, Internet data handling, interaction with IP protocols, interoperability with the operating system, and many more. So go ahead, pick up any good beginners book on Python , read the official documentation and know that it is a part of your learning schedule. Python is an extremely easy language to learn.

To create an ideal ethical hackers environment, a few steps are extremely important. The steps include: installing Virtual Machine or Virtual Box (VB) , having a basic knowledge about networking, and learning a useful programming language like Python. Let us first have a look at the basic networking knowledge.