Five years ago I got my first taste of a real IT job. I was teaching in China for an English boarding school in China and a new firewall needed to be installed. The manual was all in Chinese and the school didn’t want to bring in an outside technician to set it up. So I gave it a try and managed to get ACLs and other rules up and running. Soon after that, I would find myself securing the networks, cleaning USBs and recovering important financial data from a highly corrupted computer that no longer booted!
Needless to say, China got me interested in cyber security as a career field. In the following months after leaving China, I studied the basics and slowly grew my knowledge of security concepts and best practices. I learned a lot. Occasionally this information flowed out of my mouth like a glorious fountain when I did helpdesk and consulting work. Despite all of this knowledge I slowly realized that everything I have learned did not address the must crucial element to defending any point of information. I had absolutely no clue how to hack! Even if I did, I didn’t know where to hack…legally.
Sure I could go home, spin up a VM and try to attack but how would I even begin? I did find tutorials on hacking but there are so many exploits out there. Which ones do I want to try? Can I set up the victim machine properly so that the attack works? What if I wanted to try a different exploit? What will I need to do the configure the victim machine so that would work? Where does it end? I realized I would be spending more time configuring VMs than actually learning penetration techniques. Thus, I walked away…
Only to return a year later. I still wanted to know how to exploit systems. Places like ITProTV and Cybrary are good places to get some hands on training but it costs money which builds up over time. There are training seminars that cost thousands of dollars. Maybe on the job experience or going back to school is a good option to learn? These choices can limit who can get hands on ethical hacking training which seems to be the opposite of what the industry needs.
Fear not! It is not all gloom. If you are willing to self-study, there’s hope!
There are free sites online that offer hacking challenges from absolute newbie (me) to advanced (Hackerman?). I am going to go through some that I found pretty helpful even if some of these sites are already well-known.
Over The Wire
If your Linux skills aren’t great, OTW can help with the Bandit challenges. You’ll learn things like ssh, file traversal, netcat, and general command line usage. It is not hacking per se but knowing some basic Linux is a must for the field. I am sure that Windows or MacOSX are capable of performing hacking techniques. However, a lot of tools are designed for Linux and nine times out of ten a hacking tutorial is designed for a Linux environment. Give it a try!
https://overthewire.org/wargames/
Hack This!
Probably one of my favorite sites, HT! has challenges from webpage exploitation to steganography to cryptography. It is beginner friendly with a hint for almost all of the challenges and a forum where you can ask for help. It is also a great way to improve researching skills as you learn about different security concepts and how they can be exploited. The only downside is that you won’t actually be penetrating any VMs. Regardless, this site is a definite must!
https://www.hackthis.co.uk/
Hack This Site
Similar to HT!, HTS offers challenges from newbie to advanced in a similar categories. It also offers a forum and hints that point you in the direction you should go to learn about a concept. As before, you won’t be hacking into VMs but the experience hacking web apps should not be passed up. Another must!
https://www.hackthissite.org/
Hack The Box
Another favorite is HTB. HTB has different challenges much like before but it also has VMs just waiting to be hacked into! That’s right! Legal hacking! HTB is a step up from HT! and HTS. There are still challenges for newbies though newbie is a bit relative for this site. If you’re like me, I would recommend going through walkthroughs for retired challenges while attempting an active challenge. There is a monthly fee for access to retired challenges but it’s less than $15. The one catch is you have to hack your way into the site. If you feel up to the task, hop on, hack on.
https://www.hackthebox.eu/
Microcorruption
Although it is not hacking in the conventional sense, reverse engineering is a great way for to learn how to pick something apart and exploit it. MC is essentially an online game where you have to trick security locks to open and let in your operatives. The challenge here is that you will be working with assembly language and a simple debugger. It adds an extra twist to analyzing code and understanding what is happening. Relatively speaking, this site is accommodating for beginners.
https://microcorruption.com/login
There are a couple more sites and resources that can be helpful learning hacking with hands on experience that I do not have a lot of experience with but worth looking into.
- https://www.root-me.org/
- crackmes (more reverse engineering challenges)
- https://ctflearn.com/
- https://xss-game.appspot.com/
- https://www.hackingtutorials.org/category/metasploit-tutorials/
I’m sure there are other wonderful resources out there that won’t break the budget and still give a bang for your buck. But you get what you don’t pay for. There will be little hand holding and the learning is largely up to you. But if you don’t give up and dedicate the time, the rewards are worth it!
The 4C54 Blog 