Hacker Wannabe - If you're a hacker please come in

Hmmm... I hate to say it but in the security area I have to admit my "n00bness". I've always had an interest in this subject but never really had the chance to study or practice to become a hacker.

Now, all I'm asking is a little share of your wisdom on how a regular computer joe (like me) could develop his/her cryptographer/decrypter/hacking skills.

Notice that I'm not asking for a big bunch of your time and/or effort. All I ask for is a little guidance on where to start. Remember "there's a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path".

So, if I may say so... HELP ME BECOME A HACKER PLEASE!!!! ( )

Either way, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, there may quite a few who are afraid to ask so they won't seem stupid in the eyes of other people. Like me, they have probably read a million tutorials that are more confusing than helpful; which is what brings me to this last resort of begging for useful guidance that's actually useful!!!

I thank you all for your time either in advance, and hope I hear from you soon... (YES YOU! THE REAL HACKER WHO'S READING THIS NOW)

 

 

 

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You`re definitely not alone int this, I`m one of those poeple you described in your post.I would love to know/learn more about this too.So yeah please do share some wisdom fallow astahosters.

El

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According to old school "hacking" rules, you've already broken one of the main ones... asking for help to get started

I am a hacker by the old definition. One who goes into systems for knowledge, not to destroy. In fact, I would never go into personal info if I found any. At the most, the only changes I would make to a system that I got into is leave a message saying that thier system was insecure, and stating how I got in.

Most people that call themselves hackers are not true hackers. Most just run programs that other people make without understanding what is truely going on behind the scenes. All they usually want to do is cause damage to sites.

If you want to learn how to become a real hacker, I can point you in the right direction, but it is up to you to do the work.

When I was learning piano/keyboard, my teacher told me there are 3 P's in music: Practice, Practice, Practice. In hacking, there are 3 R's: Research, Research, Research. To start, I recommend learning linux, because you can look through all the source code. Also, get a copy of all the RFC's (Request For Comments) that document the protocols of the internet. Learning to read programming languages is a must, if you want to see what's going on. Watch the tcp/ip stack to see the communication between your computer, and others. Once you understand what is going on, then you can take a program that allows you to open a connection, and manually talk to other computers. Learning something like http is an easy way to start.

I've told you alot more than I should have. I have one other recommendation, only hack your own computers. When you hack computers you don't own, you run the risk of going to federal prison. And don't forget the 3 R's of hacking.

-YB

 

 

 

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Believe me when I understand this rule, I appreciate what you have told me because it's actually what I wanted, I did not want anyone to tell me how to do stuff, but where to begin looking for (as you said point in the right direction).

Now, it's not my intention to hack anyone else, but I'm just craving for the knowledge... sadfully I don't have the skills(yet) to accomplish this mission. Actually one of the things I really suck, and want to get better is at cryptography (and I mean There's advanced, basic. stupid and then there's me). I've really tried and practiced a lot, but it costs me to even decrypt one of those newspaper game...

On the code reading thing, well I do have some skills in that area. but if there's lack of knowledge on the basics, well you may know all the code... but...

Either way, I really appreciate your recomendations and guidance. I wish you luck and I'll keep going on with my research. REALLY... THANKS, see you around (if you ever are by southamerica or the caribbean)...

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I myself had alwasy wanted to be interested in Hacking stuff and material yet I had no clue where to go and who to ask to learn this kinda stuff. You just cant go up to a hacker online and ask him to help you out and teach you tricks hehe its more lilkely hes hacking ur pc while your chatting with him.

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This kind of topic has reminded me of the saying, "Do what you know, say what you don't." Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is no more prevalent than in message boards. There are lots of annoying retards over the Internet who threatens to, "take over the board" and threatens the board Administrator. These phonies talk a lot of smack but can't really make due with these threats.

A Hacker Wannabe's method would generally be to go message boards, make themselves known and eventually when they become bored or pissed off by an Administrator, they just strike fear upon everyone, threatening to destroy the board. The next thing you know, you're banned and everyone ends up laughing at you.

To sum it all up in a nutshell, don't be an idiot or the other kids will laugh at you.

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mmm... I'm sorry kiddo, I do not intend to attack anyone or threathen the board or whatever, I was just curious of the hacking subject. To be honest I don't care if anyone laughs at me or not, actually I couldn't care less.. I'm above that kind of situation...

Now, thanks for the "idio" and "retard" adjectives, if it wanting to learn something makes me an idiot, then I'm the major idiot in the world, since I want to learn everything that there's to learn...

Either way, I appreciate your input...

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rantsh,
I agree with yungblood: research is the only way to get skills.
you should try to find out about the most recent security issues by using your favorite search engine to look up words like "bugtraq", "vuln", "pen testing" and so on (i am sure you will find more applicable words the longer you research...)
everything i know about getting access to remote computers i found on the internet, so you surely will, too.

cryptography is even more difficult. a good site to start with ist
http://www.cryptographyworld.com/

last but not least there are some web sites with hacking & cracking challenges whre you can try your skills ... You might like this one for a start: http://www.try2hack.nl/

greetz
calixt

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This is just a story from my college days a couple years ago. I grew up around computers since age 5 started Basic programming when I was about 7ish. Still like DOS better than Windows.

Anyrate. My Senior year there were a couple freshmen that hung out at one of my friend's apartment. One kept going on about how cool his skills were and how cool AMD and Linux were and how he could hack etc..

He used my friend's PowerMac a lot to play muds. Well my friend's DSL router kept locking up and the kid using swore that maybe my friend's system was being hacked. When the kid was gone on time I was over with a couple other pals and my friend was concerned about it. I thought it was BS and pulled up the system logs from OSX and started looking through them. Took less than 5 minutes to notice the number of outbound requests going out. Looking further back, noticed the IP address and port were the same used for the kid's favourite MUD and client.

This coupled with the fact the kid had no clue what he was talking about in terms of processor design and with Linux. (which I'm not an expert, but I started with Linux in the Slackware 2 days...ended with SuSE 6.4 and moved on to *BSD)

I uninstalled the client and said, looks like the program keeps trying to connect. I moved away after college for a job and a couple months later on my friends and I were chatting online. Turns out the kid redownled the damned client and it was doing the same thing again. He also ended up failing out of college and moved back home and was working as a checker at Wal-Mart.

My point. The "I want to be a hacker so I can mispell words with letters" is a bunch of crap. Anyone who can't, or more importantly won't, spell elite correctly is just a poser-wannabe. People that too often have other issues and try to fit into the "computer nerd" subculture which doesn't quite exist as it did in the 1960's - 1980's.

My interest in network security comes from being a self-taught network and webserver admin. I ran a browser-based online text game for several years and eventually had issues with the player community trying to beat the system not the game. After someone managed to compromise an OpenBSD box I gave up because the game wasn't making that much money plus Real Life® was taking over (last semester my senior year of college)

Network security is a big business. It is the ones that can spell and use proper gramer that get paid the big bucks as consultants.

As far as learning, there are a lot of books and articles on securing networks. Try taking a class at a local community college. Several around where I am offer professional courses designed for non-degreed students looking to sharpen their skills.

And for the record. My degrees are in International Business and German. Computers was something I learned on my own all self-taught and everytime I try to walk away, some how get sucked back in...

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rantsh I feel your pain as well. This is my take on hackers and is probably not shared my most in this thread. When I have needed help in the past no one would come to my aid and quite frankly it pissed me off. When I asked for help all I got was “read it for yourself.” I think the biggest problem is that all of these “elite” hackers are all show and don’t have the first clue how a TCP packet works. As I have found out over the years, “read it for yourself” is the standard. In many cases you have to read entire books just to find a nugget of knowledge that you need. Hacking is not easy but I will try and help you the best that I can and not follow in the foot steps of my “mentors.”

For everyone else. You should not be afraid to give out knowledge. If you know something that someone else does not and they ask for it, give it freely with a smile on your face. If rantsh is truly determined he will find the knowledge by another means and you have only done him a disservice by wasting his time by asking. If on the other hand rantsh just wants a quick fix and wants to learn to hack in 30 minutes or less he will not even read to the end of my message. If he turns out to be a script-kiddie then I feel that he will not cause much damage, at least not to any systems that are properly patched (see below.) After he fools around for about 3 days it will start to bore him because he will have to do some real work after that point to make it any further. Hacking is hard work and takes a lot of time. Without the determination hacking is not possible, and I will give rantsh the benefit of the doubt and help anyway I can.

Hackers are good. They keep software writers, engineers, and companies in check. I do not agree with hacking to cause trouble (I believe the PC term now is cracker) but hacking does provide a valuable service in that hackers find the weaknesses in systems and networks. The developers in turn have to counter the new threat and provide a better piece of software. This can even be taken a step further. Although this is not always the case but many security holes usually indicate poor programming practices or techniques. If the programmer would have taken the extra time to dynamically allocate the C string buffer instead of statically allocating it, many problems would not occur.

I have studied computer security long enough to know that there are many areas which encompass “hacking.” The area is getting so large now that it is being divided into specialized areas. 150 years ago you could study engineering. 50 years ago you had mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical. Today even electrical has hundreds of sub areas of study. This is becoming the same in hacking. I can see from your previous posts that you would like to study cryptography. I will have to say that this is most demanding and hardest part of hacking.

I have had the privilege of taking a graduate level cryptography class and what else can I say but it was hard. As for the basic algorithms, they are very tedious and can take hours if you do them by hand. The communication paradigms are hard for me too because also of things have to happen for a secure connection. It was hard but I was very glad that I took the class.

Rantsh, you need to do a few things here. Modern cryptography is nothing like decoding the puzzles in the newspaper. This is the simplest form of cryptography and would be broken by a computer faster than the time it takes to lift you finger off the Enter key. The first is to buy a book called “Applied Cryptography” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471117099/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/002-9902175-7126420?v=glance&s=books) or you should be able to find it in any good library. The book that I used was “Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130914290/qid=1126026386/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9902175-7126420?v=glance&s=books) which is also a very handy reference. Run through a DES example and work a sample problem completely from beginning to end. This in its self should take a few hours to work the example. Next move on to AES. AES is more difficult as it requires advanced math (finite fields) that even I don’t understand fully. Next is the hashing algorithms and then run through key exchanges and PGP. This in itself should keep you busy for months. If this is too much for you then don’t waste you time.

While you are doing this you will have to learn a few more vital skills. All of this took me years in a college environment but are vital to learning how to hack. Learn a basic programming language. Your first one should be ANSI C, it is the mother of all and most commonly used in exploits. Also learn the basics of how a computer works creating a system from scratch to the TCP/IP protocol.

This is about all I can do at this time. Let me know if you need help. The next step for you besides what I have mentioned before is to come up with a specific question.

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