OK before we get hands on I have to give you a little bit of death by a power point but it's for good
reason.
So we need to introduce the five stages.
Ethical Hacking.
These are the five stages that you will go through on every assessment.
So before we do that let's first make a big note from here on we are moving into the ethical hacking
portion of our course.
We are going to learn malicious things.
Please only use the information learned in this course for ethical purposes.
Do not attack your neighbors not attack anybody that you do not have explicit permission to do so you
can and will get into trouble for doing that.
So with that out of the way.
Let's talk briefly about the five stages of ethical hacking.
So we start up at the top and we actually start with what is called reconnaissance.
The stage is also known as information gathering.
And there are two different types.
There is active and passive now passive is saying like going out to Google and searching for somebody
say you're given a client and you want to look at their Google you want to look at LinkedIn you might
be looking for I don't know a picture of their badge or an employee's name or maybe in employees Twitter
page.
That's all passive.
You're not actually going out to the company's website and doing anything active against it.
Now active reconnaissance kind of falls into place with the second phase which is scanning in enumeration.
Now that is active.
That is where we go out and we take tools such as and map and Nexus and Nick DOE and you never heard
of any of those.
That's fine.
Well we take those and we scan actively against a client.
Now what we're looking for are open ports vulnerabilities different items and with what returns on these
results when we do this scanning.
We also perform what is called enumeration enumeration is just looking at items and digging into them
to see if we can find anything of value say that there is a web server running on port 80.
We see Port a Potties open and it's running something like Apache patchy point two which would be really
really outdated.
We would go out to Google and we would say Google.
Do you know if a patchy one point too has any exploits for it.
And we would do research that's the enumeration portion of it.
So once we do our information gathering we do our scanning enumeration and then we move into the gaining
access portion.
This is also known as exploitation.
We will run an exploit against the client or against the vulnerable service or whatever it may be to
try to gain access into a machine or into a network into an environment etc..
Once we have that access the process starts to repeat.
We do scanning an enumeration again and we also want to maintain that access.
Right.
So if we were to get kicked out OK or a user shuts down their computer how do we maintain that access
and when they turn their computer back on we still have access to it.
And then lastly there is the covering tracks.
You want to delete any logs that you may leave behind you want to delete any kind of malware that you
upload which is more important as a pen tester.
Any accounts that you create for any reason you wanted delete those as well.
You really just want to clean up is a good way of putting it.
Covering tracks is the more hacker way of putting it.
But as a penetration tester you really just want to clean up.
So we're going to go heavily through steps one through three in this course we'll also cover four and
five of briefly but the process and methodology never changes.
Regardless if you're doing network if you're doing web app or if you're doing a different type of assessment
it's all similar in this five stages of hacking.
The tools might change the attack methods might change but the overall methodology is always the same.
So that's how we're also going to structure this course we're going to go in first and we're going to
talk about information gathering and reconnaissance then we're going to move into scanning enumeration
and then we'll start with exploitation and do that repeatedly to we get it inside of our heads and it
feels almost second nature right.
Once we have all that done we'll do some practice boxes you know give it a go see how we do we'll move
into the internal side of things with Active Directory we'll start working with our Web applications
and our wireless and we will touch on the maintaining access and covering tracks but you're going to
see this methodology over and over and you might also get this question on an interview you know to
describe the five stages so it's important to know these it's just something that every ethical hacker
can rattle off pretty quickly.
So have the written down.
Think about it.
Keep your wheels spinning and let's go ahead and move onto our first section which is going to be information
gathering slash reconnaissance and some cool tools some google fu and just what kind of information
we could actually gather on a potential client.