INTRODUCTION TO ETHICAL HACKING

                                        ETHICAL HACKING 

Ethical Hacking or Penetration testing is much more than just running exploits on vulnerable systems. In fact Penetration testing begins much before penetration tester have even made contact with the victim's system. Instead of throwing the exploits blindly on the victims a penetration tester observes his victim carefully and the attacks so that he/she gets a proper results. In order to get the desired results there are some basic steps that are to be followed. Various steps involved in Penetration testing are as follows.

 

1. INFORMATION GATHERING 

 

2. ATTACKING THE VICTIM/CLIENT.

 

3. MAINTAINING THE HOLD.

 

4. REPORTS

 

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INFORMATION  GATHERING:

It is the process of collecting as much possible data as we can. This is a very important procedure in ethical hacking. A penetration tester has to keep this in  mind that this information collected about the victim will give a clear idea about the attacks that are to be carried out on the victim. Information gathering involves the following procedures:  Footprinting and Reconnaissance, Scanning the victim/network, and Enumeration.

Footprinting:

is nothing but uncovering and collecting the victims information by different means. footprinting can be done by any means like getting info about victims or the organisation fron internet, by social engineering or by any other means. All these info collected will reaaly prove to be useful while carrying out attack.

Scanning:

a network or victims refers to the procedure of identifying hosts, ports and services running on the victim's system or  network. this procedure many times gives attacker the vulnerabilities found on the victims system/network. Penetration tester has to conduct testing and list threats and vulnerabilities found in an organization's or victims network and perform port scanning network scanning and vulnerability scanning. Most of the times this process determines the future course of our attack.

Enumeration:

is the process of extracting user names, machine names, network resources, shares and services from a system. During enumeration, information is systematically collected and individual systems are identified. In this process hosts are identified. services running on the victims system and their versions are identified and also the O.S running on the victim's syaytems are identified which makes the process of  attack more effective.

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ATTACKING THE VICTIM:

Now this is the most important process of penetration testing or hacking. All the information that we collected in the earlier steps will help us determining our attack on the victim. To make our attack really effective and fruitful the data collected have to be properly analyzed and put to work.  There are different kinds of attack that can be carried out on the victim. These attacks are as follows :  SYSTEM HACKING , SNIFFING , SOCIAL ENGINEERING , DENIAL OF SERVICE (D.O.S) , SESSION HIJACKING , WIRELESS HACKING , BUFFER OVERFLOWS and so on.....!!!

System Hacking:

is the science of testing computers and network  for vulnerabilities and plug-ins. Password hacking is one of the easiest and most common ways hackers obtain unauthorized computer or network access.

Sniffing: 

is the process that monitors any bit of information entering or leaving a network. Its a type of plug and play wiretape device attached to a computer that eavesdrops on network traffic.

Social Engineering:

is the art of convincing people to reveal confidential information. Social engineering is essentially the art of gaining access to buildings, systems, or data by exploiting human psychology rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking technique. In fact one of most wanted hacker in U.S history KEVIN MITNICK used Social Engineering. 

Denial Of Service (DoS):

is an attack on a computer or network that prevents legitimate use of its resources. In computing, a Denial of Service attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resources unavailable to its intended users.

 

Session Hijacking:

It refers to the exploitation of a valid computer session wherein an attacker takes over a session between two computers.

 

Wireless Network Hacking: 

It is the process of hacking wireless devices like Wi-fi, bluetooth. Wi-Fi have different protection applied on them like WEP, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK, WPA2-TKP.

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MAINTAINING THE HOLD:

refers to the process of installing and creating backdoors on the victim's system so that it can be exploited in the future without repeating all the process again. To maintain the hold on the victim's system backdoors are created, virus and worms are spread and even trojans are installed on the victim's system. 

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REPORTING:

This is the process of preparing a complete observation , vulnerabilities , attack carried out and the results obtained from the attack that can be exploited by a malicious hacker that could cause trouble to the client/victim. Reporting also includes the countermeasures for the possible vulnerabilities discovered so that the attacks by the hackers can be prevented.