20-minute Intro to Hacking

Mike Gagnon, Ethical Hackerhttp://mikegagnon.com

First things first…

Ethical Hacking• Be responsible • Don’t use hacking for

evil • It’s easy to be caught,

and the penalties are very steep

Guideline: Never hack someone’s system without

their permission

Why do ethical hackers hack?

• It’s fun

• “War games.” Companies hire ethical hackers to hack into their systems so that the companies can learn how to improve their defenses

• Ethical hackers develop defensive technology

• Every coder should know how to hack, so that they know how to write “secure code” (which is code that can defend itself from hackers)

How to hack?

• Hacking = manipulating a system to do something it wasn’t designed to do

• Like hot wiring a car

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dash_Wires.jpg

• Hacking computers is often simple (once you know how computers work)

How do computers work?For example: What happens when you type google.com in your

browser?

• There is a computer on the Internet whose address is google.com

• Your computer sends a “request” to that computer

• The google.com computer computes a “response” and sends it back to your computer

• Your computer shows the response on your screen

Just like requesting a person to compute something for you

request

this responseis a web page:

google.com computes the response

Example DoS attack• DoS = denial of

service

• Send a request for a very difficult computation

• It might crash the computer

• The Air Force once challenged me to hack their radar. That’s how I did it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C-band_Radar-dish_Antenna.jpg

http://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/cybersec/publications/publication-files/full_papers/2010_06_25_Gagnon_ISARCS_FP.pdf

Hack my server!• You have my permission to try

to crash: http://hackerpuzzle.herokuapp.com

• But I won’t tell you how

• It’s a puzzle

I repeat:• Be responsible • Don’t use hacking for

evil • It’s easy to be caught,

and the penalties are very steep

Guideline: Never hack someone’s system without

their permission

Teach yourself to hack • It can be a career

• Learn everything you can about how computers work

• Learn to code

• Learn math (algebra, calculus, statistics, and beyond)

• Experiment a lot

• Find hacking challenges on the Web

• Be tenacious

• Be patient

• Be ethical