video series?

[zukine321]

I know a little bit of programming. Just know some autoit,php and html. Wanted to enter the world of hacking. Nothing too malicious of course I goggled packet sniffing and found your video on wire shark. Looked at some of your videos and there are so many of them. there is alot of terminology and jargon and some of it is explained . I was wondering if you guys have a video playlist of the most important videos to watch or ascending difficulty. I was considering watching all of the hak tips but they seem old and maybe outdated. ( i hardly saw of them)

[cooper]

I'd say anything from last year is still relevant. Check the man page for commands they've used to see if possibly any of the parameter switches have changed meaning.

Any of the Hak5 videos are targeted at the modest beginner level - you're not a total noob but even if you are simply googling the words you don't know should get your going. What they do on the show is demonstrate some bit of technology, showing one possible use so interested people can have a starting point themselves by just following their lead. On top of that they quickly go over a number of additional features of the product (enumerating them, mostly) for those who are already familiar with the concept and need to know if that specific implementation is something that might be right for them. You don't have to know what those features are just yet in order to use the product, but you could google it to get an idea if a feature mentioned might be relevant to you.

The HakTip videos takes a program and, over the course of a number of short videos explains by example the various things you can get the program to do and why that might be useful.

So no, there isn't a listing of videos in ascending difficulty. They typically provide a new video for both Hak5 and HakTip every week so the last 50 or so episodes should be about stuff that isn't yet particularly outdated.

[sud0nick]

Are you interested in learning more about programming as well? For that you won't find many videos but there are a TON of books and online courses that can help you. Programming is not required to break into systems but it will definitely help you. It is also a lot of fun and you will be able to augment the programs used to hack systems as well as build your own.

[zukine321]

Yes. I was thinking on what programming language should I learn first. Maybe C++ or Phython I personally like creating more than hacking. But hacking to troll people seems rly fun! I would Like to RAT Someone just to change their desktop picture. But I dont know how use to RAT. Knowing a top tier language seems more important. Can you guys explain to me why you all use Linux over windows?

[cooper]

Can you guys explain to me why you all use Linux over windows?

I use Linux for everything because of its ease of use (yes, really) and the fact that you can do everything from the vastly more powerful command line. It takes a bit to truly come to grips with it but once you get the basics you're already well on your way.

For most of the hackers here it's probably a matter of control. In Linux, when you're root (=admin) the system will assume you know what you're doing and let you do it. For example, if you want to set the first 10000 bits on your harddisk to 1, you can (will render the harddisk unbootable and probably mess up the partition table). If you want to read what's in the system's memory from 0x00AABBCC to 0x00AABBDD regardless of what program or possibly even programS use parts of that memory region at that moment in time, you can.

The Windows philosophy if you will is "To do X you need to find a program that lets you do X" which more often than not means "To do X, buy EXPENSIVE_PROGRAM that does Y, Z and M which is almost but not quite X but you'll manage".

The *nix philosophy is "Do one thing and do it well" which means "To do X, we chop X up into A B C and D where for each B we need to do C twice. A, B and D are available, C needs to be created, but it can be done using a small script. If we tie it all together in another script we have X and we're done". This is also why a lot of very useful programs have so many different parameters and why there are such powerful filtering programs available - when the output of A needs to become the input of B you might have to tweak A's output to provide all the needed data, tweak B's input to accept the provided data and possibly add a filter between the two to leave out the data A produced but B isn't interested in or to reformat the data so B knows what it is.

Simple example. Say you're a secretary and you've sent out an invitation to the staff for a meeting this afternoon. The speaker wants to know how many people accepted the invitation. I know Outlook has this functionality built-in, so if you have Windows, Exchange and Outlook this is easy. But what if you didn't have this option in Outlook? You'd send out the invite asking those who'll attend to reply. You'd move the replies into a separate mail folder and count them by selecting the lot and looking at the status bar to see how many there are. If someone replied to accept and later sends another reply to accept (say from his mobile, having forgotten he replied already), he's now counted twice.

Same scenario on Linux. All incoming email isn't stored in some opaque database format (.pst) but in a maildir which is nothing more than a folder where each file is one email. You too make a subfolder for invite responses which becomes a subfolder in the maildir. Want to know how many people will attend? From the command line enter the folder and "ls | wc -l" will tell you how many emails are there. To get a list of their names do "grep -m 1 'From: ' | sed 's/From: //'" and if you want any duplicates out and the result in alphabetical order it becomes "grep -m 1 'From: ' | sed 's/From: //' | sort | uniq". If you need to do that once, you spend 2 minutes typing that on the command line. If you need to do that more than once, you put that command in a .sh file, make it executable and run it next time you need to.

Will any secretary ever do that? FUCK NO! But to someone who makes a point of having his/her system do all the heavy work for them, you can hopefully see why the Linux solution provides WAY more options to control the flow of information.

Different example: I've got a rather vast music collection. I'm into metal so if I want to listen to music I enjoy, it's down to me to play it since the radio doesn't like people like me. To manage this large collection of files, I need structure and consistency. So, any track of any band is in /path/to/Music/<FirstLetterOfBand>/<Band>/<Album>/<2DigitTrackNr>. <Trackname>.mp3 and the MP3 file will be 192KBit CBR.

When you download or rip a track, it rarely looks like that. Any track is likely to be "RiPpEd_by_Biggus_Dickus-Band-<AlbumWithTypo>-<TrackNr>_<TruncatedTrackName>.flac" or some such. The ID3 tag is likely to be a mess too. To sort that out I put those files in a folder named for the album. I have a 'namestrip.sh' script that chucks out bits of a filename in the current directory so "namestrip.sh RiPpEd_by_Biggus_Dickus-" would be something to start with. I have a 'replace.sh' script that takes a sed pattern and replaces the first match within a filename with the replacement value. I can make it replace all the matches with an extra parameter. With the filename in order, I move the new album folder to the appropriate directory in my structure and once it's there I once again enter the album folder and run the 'recode.sh' script which assumes the folder and filename format that I already described, checks if the file is 192KBit CBR MP3 and if not decodes it to WAV and then recodes it as that. Then finally it adds an ID3 tag populated with the information gleaned from the folder/filename structure.

I spent an hour I think writing those scripts and they've saved me AGES in time working out what's what. If I had to do that with Windows, I'd need a program that would help me with that and I'd be bound to the format the program thinks I should use which might not be what I want to use.

I believe that if you want to learn Linux/Unix, your first and most important starting point is the shell. Just simple bash will let you do a *LOT* of stuff that you'd currently think you need a program for. If you can't make the system do what you want using just the shell and the various programs already available to you, *that* is when you break out the big guns and work on doing things in Python, C, C++, Perl or what have you. And when you decide which language is right for you, the answer is simply the language that lets you do what you need to do the easiest and the quickest. Nobody does ASM these days, but if that's all you know it's automatically the best tool for the job until you've learned something more appropriate.

Edited January 4, 2015 by Cooper