The following websites offer you a free and legal way to acquire practical hacking skills. If you are going to stop the bad guys, you need to know how they act to protect your own servers and wargames are the best way to be one of the bad guys without worrying about the FBI knocking at your door or harming anybody.
The computers you will be hacking in wargames are virtual machines that can be easily reset, and if you get lost, a community of white hackers will be willing to help you out teaming up with you or sharing experiences.
Exploit Exercises: A site giving you access to various virtual machines to hack, you will be given challenges, like scanning a network to find what vulnerabilities exist and how to exploit them. This site is admirably structured with the servers separated in between different hacking skills and levels. You can download a .iso or .ova (Open Virtual Application) and run it locally in your computer to hack it as if it was online.
Hacking Lab: An IT security portal with various hacking tests, it has its own custom live CD with a VPN connection that you can use for hacking. Just like in real life, where you have to scan a server to fingerprint them before launching an exploit, in hacking lab you will have to find the IP or DNS of the vulnerable server before a hacking attack can take place.
Online hacking game hacking lab
Pen Tester Lab: Full of penetration training exercises for people interested in becoming a PEN tester. You are given weekly computer security exercises in the boot camp section, lessons will get more and more difficult as you complete them. Tasks are clearly explained with links to the files you have to download if necessary.
HackThisSite: One of the wargame sites that has been the longest around, with a great hacking community that will help you expand your skills, you can chat with like minded people in HackThisSite forums or in the old school hacker’s communication tool IRC. This site stands out from the crowd with their extensive amount of free learning resources.
cyberwar game HackThisSite
Hacker Project: A fictional hacking game set in the future where governments have gone bankrupt and multinationals take over the World stopping free flow of information. Your job will be to return power to the people by infiltrating corporations and use their information technology network against them. This site is for entertainment, you don’t hack anything for real, but the game is realistic.
HackerForEver: Text based browser game revolving around the dark world of hackers, from the good white hackers up to the bad black hacker guys. You can choose what side you would like to be on, the game has various clans you can join and a community. You will not do real hacking here, just a simulation, games like this serve as introduction to the hacking slang world, suitable for people of any level.
There are two kind of hackers, malicious hackers who crack email accounts, distribute viruses, cause destruction and steal money from others, known as crackers or black hat hackers, and ethical hackers who tweak hardware and software to create things that nobody ever thought about, hackers are also programmers and security penetration testers whose job is to find a vulnerability, software bug or technical error before the bad guys do, warning the company/community, aka white hat hackers, this post is about how to become an ethical hacker.
To become a computer hacker requires intelligence, dedication and tenacity, problem solving abilities are a must have and above all you must like computer tinkering since you will spend lots of time working with them. Even thought most desktop computers run on Windows, most servers run some kind of Unix variant, i.e. Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris.
Knowing only Windows will get you nowhere, the first step you should do to become a hacker is to get used to a Unix based operating system where you get to see that not all is a point and click mouse and you can play with a program’s source code, unlike Windows or MAC, source code in Unix is free to modify and distribute, aka open source.
GRML Linux hackers distribution
Linux distributions for hackers:
GRML: A Debian based Linux distribution specially designed for system administrators and text tool users, capable of analyzing systems/networks, to be used as a rescue system or as a main desktop.
Kali Linux: Distribution intended for security professionals, with tools for hacking wireless access points, exploiting web servers and learning, an indispensable security penetration testing tool.
Tip: If you are a Linux beginner download something easier like Knoppix, if you do not want to install it in your computer it can be run as a live CD/DVD or USB thumbdrive, and do not forget that BSD distributions like OpenBSD are also appropriate for hackers.
Programming languages a hacker should learn
Python is a well designed and documented programming language ideal for beginners due to its power and friendliness, C is a +40 years old general purpose programming language still in use, C++ is related to C and knowing one of the languages will make learning the other easy, Perl is a Unix scripting language often used in network administration, you will need to know Perl in order to understand other people scripts rather than writing it yourself, LISP (LISt Processing) is an ancient programming language closely connected with artificial intelligence projects, reverse engineering and being able to disassemble software is a must have skill for software hackers, if you come across a trojan you will want to know how it works and what it does.
Python: Flexible intuitive programming language with clear and readable syntax, it uses standard libraries and third party modules.
Perl: Feature rich programming language that can be embedded into webservers and databases, also used in e-commerce.
Learn the English language
English is the main communication language in between people of different countries wherever you go, the ability to communicate verbally and in writing in English is an essential skill, if you have a different mother tongue, once you have mastered the English language you will be able to translate documentation and will be in a better position than monolingual people. English speaking people must also take care not to misspell or make grammatical errors as that makes you look illiterate, impressions count, nobody is going to hire someone who appears to be uneducated and can’t spell.
Reference Dictionary: A free online thesaurus and dictionary with words of the day and quotes to help you improve your reading and writing skills.
Social engineering
Information and communication technologies relies on humans one way or another, human resources, network administrators and security guards are all composed of humans, if a system is too hard to get into then hack the people in charge (aka social engineering). Some companies hire penetration testers to discover their own weak points and test staff security awareness before something happens for real.
How to become a hacker
You will want to learn human psychology, what makes people give up their password to strangers? How to get information out of people without knowing them? Can people be fooled into thinking a stranger works for the company just because he says so? All of that is used by hackers to learn of administrator passwords and much more.
Security Now podcast: Weekly podcast with computer security expert Steve Gibson, news and tutorials about hacking, security vulnerabilities and Internet privacy.
Learn HTML
Everything worthwhile to learn is on the Internet, tutorials, ebooks, software, is all served to you in websites, you should learn HTML language (not a programming language) this will be useful to understand how websites work and help you to create a blog/website or manage a forum where to interact with others.
W3Schools: Web developer portal for beginners and advanced users, you will learn how to develop a website and technologies being used to do that (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL).
Hacking war games
Technology evolves quickly you need to keep learning and adapt to new challenges, security is not a target that can be reached, it is a process that you need to keep improving for ever, hackers never give up due to failure, they keep trying until they find a solution no matter how hard it is. Getting involved in an open source project will be a good way to be part of a community and keep your skills up to date, open source project take all kind of volunteers regardless of skills, if you can’t program yet maybe you can write documentation on how things work.
Another good way to keep your skills up to date and getting started in the hacking world is by joining a war game where the target is to hack other people, everything being legal and only being simulated, aka hacker games.
HackThisSite: A free legal website where to train your hacking skills, with tutorials and a forum where to discuss network security and anything related with computers.
Hacker-Project: Online hacking simulation game where you have to complete tasks like installing virii, hiding/encrypting files,recover logs, acquire computer IPs and collect profits of your hacking activities.
Get hacker status
If you help to test and debug open source software, keep the infrastructure working, write open source software, and publish useful information and submit it to conferences, you will soon come into contact with other hackers who will appreciate your help and dedication as well as admire you for your work, you will make a name for yourself and if you are good enough, get invited to conferences as a speaker, networking will help you be part of the community and maybe even find an employer or people with whom to work together in a project.
Defcon (DEFense CONdition): One of the oldest hackers conferences in the world where to meet like minded people and showcase new hacking tricks and tips.
BlackHat: A series of highly technical information security conferences that brings together hackers from government agencies, corporations and the underground world.
