Summary

This chapter laid a solid foundation for certified ethical hackers. It covered the fundamentals of ethical hacking, including why we do what we do, the strategies we use, and the information security laws and standards that security professionals need to have at their fingertips.

To cover all the basics, it introduced you to cyberattacks, attackers, ethical hackers, hacking techniques, and strategies, and what happens in both the good guys' and the bad guys' camps.

After listing the benefits of having a CEH certification, the chapter covered the fundamentals of CEH.

It gave you a pretty good grasp on information security, the tenets of the CIA triad, types of cyberattacks, the hacking phases cybersecurity professionals watch out for, the technology triangle, types of hackers and how to identify them by the way they behave and the attacks they carry out, the hacking phases and what happens at each stage, why cyberattacks happen, and what motivates attackers.

It also covered the behavioral identification of attackers, the methods attackers use to execute attacks, and the strategies and techniques cybersecurity professionals use to discourage, deter, misdirect, or slow them.

It also got you to study the world's best hacker framework, the CKC, as you went through the steps that trace the stages of an attack, right from reconnaissance through to exfiltration of data.

Now that we've got a good understanding of information security, let's next dive deeper into how attackers begin to target organizations by performing reconnaissance and footprinting. The next chapter will show you how easy it is to discover intelligence, such as systems being used, names of employees, infrastructure layouts, and even data on social media that could help attackers breach a network.