Hacker’s toolkit 2022
Modern hacking, ethics and statistics
Read about the largest DDoS in history and how honing your hacking skills might help you prevent the next one…
A gerund and an infinitive walk in to the Linux kernel. They were hacking to learn. An awful adaptation of a (drinking to forget) joke, but a reasonable opener. An incredibly useful maxim from long ago hacker lore is “don’t learn to hack, hack to learn”. It’s worth taking some time to marinate on this message.
For example, if you search Google for “how to hack” or worse “how to hack gmail”, we can pretty much guarantee you won’t find any useful information. Indeed, you’ll probably find all sorts of spam and phishing links that we wouldn’t recommend touching, even with JavaScript turned off. This isn’t because search engines are producing increasingly bad search results, but because hackers and advertisers know the kinds of intellects who are searching for these terms. And unfortunately they know how to monetise them, too.
Yet there are plenty of good resources where you can learn network reconnaissance, penetration testing and even phishing techniques. Sites like https://tryhackme. com, for example, will teach you these skills with a view to learning how to defend against them. TryHackMe makes the learning process fun by gamifying tutorials, in some cases giving you VMs to download and intrude. There are lessons, labs and competitions that will help you learn everything from Metasploit to Maltego.