Book Image

Learn Ethical Hacking from Scratch

By : Zaid Sabih
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Ethical Hacking from Scratch

5 (1)
By: Zaid Sabih

Overview of this book

This book starts with the basics of ethical hacking, how to practice hacking safely and legally, and how to install and interact with Kali Linux and the Linux terminal. You will explore network hacking, where you will see how to test the security of wired and wireless networks. You’ll also learn how to crack the password for any Wi-Fi network (whether it uses WEP, WPA, or WPA2) and spy on the connected devices. Moving on, you will discover how to gain access to remote computer systems using client-side and server-side attacks. You will also get the hang of post-exploitation techniques, including remotely controlling and interacting with the systems that you compromised. Towards the end of the book, you will be able to pick up web application hacking techniques. You'll see how to discover, exploit, and prevent a number of website vulnerabilities, such as XSS and SQL injections. The attacks covered are practical techniques that work against real systems and are purely for educational purposes. At the end of each section, you will learn how to detect, prevent, and secure systems from these attacks.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
22
Discovering Vulnerabilities Automatically Using OWASP ZAP

What is a website?

Before we can start website penetration testing, we need to understand what a website really is. A website is just an application that is installed on a computer. The computer might have better specifications than our computer, but fundamentally, it works just like any other computer, which means that it has an operating system, as well as a number of applications that allow it to act as a web server. The two main applications that it has are a web server (for example, Apache), and a database (for example, MySQL):

  • The web server basically understands and executes the web application. Our web application can be written in PHP, Python, or any other programming language. The only restriction is that the web server needs to be able to understand and execute the web application.
  • The database contains the data that is used by the web application. All of this is stored...