Hello everybody and welcome to this tutorial. Today, I will be talking about
some of the basic terms which you will need in order to follow this course
through. So, first off, you have three main categories of people. There are white hat
hackers, grey hat hackers, and black hat hackers. Everything that we will be doing
falls into this category here, so white hats. Those are people whose activities
are within the confines of the law. There are people such as pen testers, ethical
hackers, people like you, and me, and so on. Then you have grey hat hackers whose
activities are bordering between legal and illegal. It's a bit of a shady area
there. In addition to that you have the most known category which is black hat
hackers, and usually, and unfortunately, every time somebody hears the term
hacking it is associated with people from the black hat world. There are people
who conduct all sorts of illegal activities, or conduct activities without
any regard for the law, and, I don't know, extract information from certain servers,
credentials, your credit card information, take services down usually to extract
some sort of financial gain. In any case, down below you have
footprinting. Now the act of footprinting is basically information
gathering. You are you're conducting some sort of reconnaissance work, you are
figuring out the IP of the server, figuring out which ports are open, and
with that you can conclude which services are running there, but it
doesn't necessarily need to be confined to the digital world. The act of foot
printing can also be when you go to the company itself. You just walk in, it doesn't
necessarily need to be a company it can be pretty much any building with the
servers in it, and you have a look around. You try to gather some information there
on site where you go and you dig into their trash cans. Go behind the building,
jump into the trash containers, and get some
information from there. Also, people have been known to go into parking lots to
see who the employees are, who works there, all sorts of things. So this is
just general information gathering in regards to your chosen target. It doesn't
need to be confined to the digital world. Anyway, down below you have certain types
of attacks. You have DoS and DDoS. Very simply the same thing implemented in a
different way. DoS stands for denial of service. Usually
called childish attacks because they were relatively easy to implement, and
they still are provided of course you have enough machines. But that's
the domain of DDoS. In general, what happens here is that you perform a
certain amount of requests, more requests in a server can handle, and then the server
begins dropping connections. For example, an Apache web server I believe by
default it can handle up to 10,000 connections or so. And if you can make
more than 10,000 requests, basically everybody else making any sort of
requests will not be able to access the website because their connections will
be dropped. Simply because Apache will say, OK I have
too many users, I have more users than I can handle, all the other connections
will be dropped by default. Thereby making the site inaccessible even though
you haven't really broken any codes. You haven't really
broken through any firewalls, or stole any passwords, or anything of a
kind. But when you're DoS'ing something it's just you, so all
the requests, everything is coming just from your own computer. And that is not
always the most efficient of ways. In fact, it generally can only work if there
is a flaw in the way in which requests are processed. However, that is why you
have DDoS attacks. When you have multiple computers,
multiple connections, and they are all making simultaneous requests to a
certain server, and this is really difficult to fight off, I mean you really
need to have a clever configuration of your firewall, and you need to have quite
a good firewall as well. Usually you would need a physical one to prevent these sort of
DDoS attacks, and by physical I mean a router firewall, or something of a kind.
This is quite difficult to, it's not difficult to actually do the attack
itself as it is difficult to make the necessary preparations. First of all, you
need to go about infecting other devices which you will use, which you will
enslave and use in order to perform this sort of an attack. This is the hard part.
The DDoS part is quite easy compared to that. For that, in order for you to infect
other computers, you need two things. You need RATs, remote administration tools,
and you need to FUD.
Fully undetectable, that is what the term FUD stands for. So it just means that
they cannot be detected by anti viruses, or the more precise term would be
that they are not labeled as something malicious by antivirus programs. And by
the way, sometimes, actually most of the time, most of the time you don't
actually need to make your own applications fully undetectable. There
are plenty of pen testing companies out there, and not just pen testing companies
but other companies as well, who will pay very good sums of money if
you can make their programs fully undetectable by antivirus programs. Down
below the RATs, remote administration tools. Now they themselves are not some
sort of hacks, or anything of a kind, they just basically put
them on a USB stick, or something of a kind, send them in the mail, send them and
share them in a zip file, and in such a way that's just one of the ways to
infect other computers, other devices, enslave them,
convert them into your slaves, into the slaves to the main server, wherever
that might be, wherever you might set it up, and then you can use all of those
computers to conduct all sorts of activity. This is very good
because it anonymizes you to a very large extent, it is very difficult to
track you, it's very difficult to track somebody down, whoever is doing this,
primarily because the users who are infected they have no idea that somebody
else is controlling their devices, because nothing is really happening on
your desktop. You can't really see all the processes running are being run in
the background, and your processor is executing them, the only way to
see it would be basically to start up a task manager, or something of a kind, and
then see the running processes and perhaps you could spot it there, but not
even there if somebody has implemented a rootkit.
So a rootkit is a tool, basically, which you install on to an operating system,
and it is able to hide running processes from the system itself. So when you for
example start a task manager in Windows, or something of a kind, the purpose of a
rootkit would be to hide the processes from the task manager. Basically, how it
works is that the task manager requests information from the system, from the
kernel, and then the kernel of the system responds which is the core of the system
where all the drivers and the key functionalities are. The kernel of the
system then responds hey, I have this, this, this, and this process running, here
you go, but what a rootkit would do is redirect
those requests from the task manager to itself, and would basically say, I don't
have such processes running. So, very, very dangerous and potent combinations here
that we will use later on as we progress through this tutorial, but for the time
being I just wanted to give a bit of an introduction to it and give you an idea
of what we shall be doing through some of these basic terms and concepts.
Next up, we have phishing attacks. Now phishing attacks are basically when
you apply some sort of bait, somebody bites it, then you pull on it. Simple as
that, right, the same way you go fishing. Well, not quite.
Phishing attacks would be when you get an email from someone
and there's a link in it, you click on it, and it throws you
somewhere, I don't know, onto some website. It perhaps looks like something legit.
It perhaps looks like a website that you are using, or something of a kind, but
it is not, and you pass in your credentials and that can be a problem.
But this is generally avoided today. This is not something that happens in such a
way. Rather instead, what happens these days is that the DNS servers get changed
on your routers, and once that happens all the requests that you make on your
web browser would get redirected. So, for example, if you type in facebook.com
you're gonna get a domain with facebook.com from some private DNS
server, god knows where, whose MX records are altered, and they
have been configured for example to make redirections
to interpret, sorry not redirections but rather instead to interpret
facebook.com to a certain IP address that does not belong to Facebook, or
anything like that. So you open up your Facebook, it looks
exactly the same, there is no way to tell because in the upper left corner
of the screen you have the domain name written, it's www.facebook.com, and
basically you provide login credentials. Once you do that they're gone, somebody
has them. One of the one of the ways to detect this, even though it's very, I mean
it's not hard but nobody really pays any attention to it, in the upper left corner
you might check whether the protocol is HTTPS instead of HTTP. Because usually if
these kind of attacks are conducted it's not going to be HTTPS as that is alot
harder to implement. But if it is HTTPS, they really wouldn't be any legit way of
figuring it out other than actually checking the keys,
checking their certificates, and nobody actually does that. I mean well, maybe not
nobody, but 99% of users out there are not gonna bother to go about conducting
such checks. Anyway, I know it sounds a bit complex, but believe me I will
explain this in great details, I will give you several demonstrations, and by
the end of this course you will understand and know how to do this with
great ease. It will not present a significant obstacle in your line of
work. Excellent! Now that we have approximately half of these terms out of
our way I will continue to deal with them in the follow-up tutorial, and I
hope to see you all there.