How to become a computer genius or hacker. How to acquire hacking skills
It’s unlikely that you sat quietly in your room for 20 years, studied well, obeyed your parents in everything, never deceived anyone, never took anything from anyone else in your life, and then, bam, you wanted to become a cyber hacker. Most likely, this already lives in you: you are easily carried away by the search for an original solution, you absorb computer knowledge like a sponge, you can’t stand manuals, you trust only your own trial and error method, and professional literature is only one of the assistants. And now a grain of truth has begun to sprout in your head, a desire to stand on the other side of the law. Not for the sake of money, purely out of curiosity. Where to begin?
Learn a language
Since you have decided to become a hacker, then you probably know English perfectly. If not, then any of your further tasks will become twice as complicated - first, with a dictionary, you will look for what exactly you are hacking, and only then look for ways - again with a dictionary. In addition, if your career takes off, then it’s a good idea to know the basic part of some other languages - Spanish, German, French. It will be useful in life, and it won’t hurt in work. Developers also sometimes come across as ignorant.
Choose a specialization
As with any other hobby, it is important to decide on a specialization as soon as possible. No, of course, you first need to start by studying the shell of applied hardware - applications and operating systems, then move on to a larger level. The main thing to remember is that there are dozens of types of attacks and hacking techniques: it will take years to master everything at a decent level. Therefore, if you are ambitious and want to not just try, but achieve serious success, decide on your area of work and develop skills in this direction. With due persistence, within six months you will have your first significant scalp on your account.
Read the literature
Although a good hacker is distinguished by the fact that all his knowledge is gained empirically, it would be foolish to try to surpass many years of security experience without using the experience of others. Here's where to start your literary excursion: "The Art of Deception", "Hacking: the Art of Exploitation", "The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing: Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing","Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide". After mastering them, at least you will no longer have stupid questions like “where to go” and “what to do.”
Don't listen to anyone
The whole essence of a hacker's activity lies in research rather than sabotage. Therefore, if you have your own head on your shoulders, never take other people’s criticism seriously, do not believe in the existence of a “right” path and do not succumb to provocations. If hackers don't do what they like, then who will?
Keep the rhythm
No matter how excitingly you get caught up in a new hobby, don’t rush to get involved in serious projects. Gradually study your chosen business, learn not only to destroy, but also to create. And of course, try to immediately kill the desire to hack something big and famous. This is fraught not only with the possibility of running into an insurmountable wall, but also with receiving a very real sentence.
Challenge
At the same time, do not rush to rest on the laurels of your first successes. While people on the other side are working to create more and more ideal protection, your task is to keep up with the times and look for flaws and patterns in it. No one calls for immediately winning the jackpot at the competition Pwnium, but it is necessary to think seriously about this, and most importantly, to strive for this.
Find a suitable job
To catch a criminal, you need to think like him. To bypass the built defense, you need to get into the team that creates it. This will greatly help accelerate professional growth, partially monetize your passion, and in general, it may make you think about the correctness of your chosen side.
However, there is an alternative universal option - just change your occupation. On the one hand, this way you will approach your favorite business with great enthusiasm and a fresh mind, on the other hand, you will not fall out of society. After all, even the most malicious hackers must have a personal life.
Stop being afraid
And in general, it’s enough to spend at least 10 seconds in any search engine to realize that there are a huge number of ways in the world (competitions, competitions, work) that allow you to thoroughly stretch your brain and at the same time make money. Today, information protection is, literally, an international problem, connected, among other things, with the main threat to humanity - terrorism. Therefore, if your inquisitive mind wants, and most importantly can, hack something, but is critically afraid of getting punished for it, a huge number of IT companies will be ready to cooperate with you.
How to become a hacker? You have probably asked this question more than once, so HelpU decided to look into this issue and write your point of view about it.
Hacker is not just a buzzword, it is the name of an entire subculture. A kind of elite among computer scientists. Do not rush to doubt this word. There’s just an opinion that a hacker is an intruder who just wants to harm someone and do something unpleasant. In fact, this is completely wrong! The creators of viruses, thieves of confidential information, hackers of programs and websites are not exactly hackers. A hacker is not a pest, but rather a helper. In fact, one could say that hackers created the Internet and the World Wide Web, the Unix operating system. They help program developers find errors and correct incorrect sections of the program code. Let's take a closer look at who a hacker is, how he differs from other people, and how you can become one. How to become a hacker, even from scratch?
The hacker emblem is a symbol of the attitude towards hacker culture. The emblem depicts a “glider” - one of the figures in the game “Life”.
So, a program cracker is not a hacker, in computer slang he is a cracker. From the word crack - to break. Anyone who breaks a program or website can be called a cracker, but he will be very far from a real hacker. The main difference between them: a cracker causes harm, a hacker brings benefit. Apart from the fact that hacking is a criminal offense and can lead to an actual criminal sentence, such hacking actions cannot inspire an iota of respect. That’s why hackers, to put it mildly, don’t like crackers.
However, let's add more specifics and discuss what it takes to become a hacker. Since a hacker is an excellent programmer, then knowledge of programming languages is needed. If you don’t have such knowledge yet, then it’s okay, everything can be mastered, although not in one day. And not even in a year. But you can start now and gradually improve your skills. What can I say, sometimes you have to improve yourself all your life in order to always be at the peak. Python would be a good choice as a first programming language. This is quite a powerful and flexible tool. Java is great for a second language.
To become a real master, simply learning one or two programming languages is not enough. To do this you need to think algorithmically. A programming language is just a tool. Pasta fork. The main thing is to have pasta, and you can eat it with any fork. Ideally, mastering the language only takes a couple of months to learn the operators and relate them to your style of writing an algorithm. Therefore, it is important to learn two or more languages that are very different from each other in order to master all aspects of creating algorithms.
A serious step in improving professionalism and programming skills will be mastering the C language - the main language of the Unix operating system. However, you shouldn’t start with it, it will be extremely difficult. Perl is actively used for system administration and website administration. Even if writing it from scratch is not a priority task, then being able to read and modify code on it is a must. Well, the LISP language is also quite important. Ultimately, having mastered it, you will gain serious skills in algorithmization.
Ideally, you need to master all 4 of the listed programming languages - Python, C, Perl, LISP. Besides the importance of knowing these languages, they are very different in their approaches to programming and each will make an important contribution to its own development.
Actually, programming techniques are quite difficult to teach. Most hackers are self-taught; they learned everything they can do themselves. We can only give general recommendations. Programming skill consists of two important parts - the ability to read code and the ability to write it. Training in both processes can be combined. Take good sources, read, understand how they work, write your own based on them. There is no problem with this, because a hacker is a good-natured person who happily shares his developments with others. You can find many programs, utilities, even operating systems created by hackers and whose source code is available. It can be read, analyzed and modified.
Since we're talking about operating systems, let's touch on the issue of arranging a hacker's workplace. Of course, this is a computer on which you need to install an operating system. It will not only ensure the operation of other tools, but in itself can serve as a source of knowledge. Therefore, a closed-source OS is completely unsuitable for this. It is better to use a Unix-based distribution - it can be either Linux or some system based on the BSD kernel. In addition, most Internet servers are based on Unix. Therefore, if you want to become an Internet hacker, then without knowledge of Unix, it will not work. In addition, under Unix you can run any other operating system - Windows, Mac, etc., if you need it.
The Internet and WWW are part of our lives; we can’t live without them now. Therefore, it is important to master the World Wide Web very well. Not just travel through it, but work with it. Before mastering serious programming languages, you can learn the hypertext markup language of web pages - HTML. It is extremely easy to learn, and the process of mastering it will help in the future. In addition, there are a lot of sensible guides on learning HTML. Create a home website or just a page for yourself. Subsequently, along with the growth of your knowledge and skills, you can modernize your site and run experiments on it.
Another important point. You must know English. Some hackers for whom English is not their native language prefer to discuss technical issues in English, and if you do not know it, access to much of the information will be blocked. In addition to English, of course, knowledge of your native language must be five points. A letter with grammatical errors will obviously not add points to your reputation.
Hacker is not just a profession or hobby. It's a lifestyle. Therefore, a hacker must be in a hacker environment, among colleagues and associates. And in order for them to accept you as an equal, you need to earn respect and recognition. You can tell yourself “I’m a hacker” as much as you like, but you will only be a real hacker when others say about you “you’re a hacker.”
The most important thing for a hacker-programmer, of course, is to program. Write interesting and useful programs and distribute them for free along with the source code. Learned it yourself, tell someone else. The people who earn the most respect in the hacker community are the authors of powerful and useful software, they created truly useful programs that are now used by millions of people and distribute them freely, open source, so that anyone who needs such a program can get it .
It is also important to help other hackers, debug their programs. Find and fix errors, test open source programs. Debugging a program always takes a lot of time. And success depends on how quickly and efficiently all the errors were found. A good tester will always find something to do with himself. If you're a new hacker, the best way to build relationships and improve your knowledge is to find an open source program that requires debugging and testing. You will learn a lot and build a reputation for yourself in the process.
In addition, among hackers you can always find something to do for the benefit of society, and you can’t forget yourself. Be sure to share information you receive or find, such as guides, FAQs, and other materials. Development of documentation for programs, moderation of mailing lists and subscription lists. All this is not as exciting as working with source codes, but it is very useful for recognition by the hacker community as well.
As for professional qualities - we briefly went over them, we can also touch on the personal sphere of the future hacker. You don't have to be a bespectacled nerd to become a hacker. You can lead a completely measured social life. But if you decided to take up hacking because of failures in your personal life, why not. Then nothing will stop you from concentrating on this area of activity. It’s good if you’re into science fiction, there will be something to talk about besides straight hacker topics.
And, perhaps, the last thing. Sign with your real name. Nicknames are used by those who have something to hide, for example, crackers. A hacker is not a pest, he does useful things, and he has no one to hide from.
Denial of responsibility: This article is written for educational purposes only. The author or publisher did not publish this article for malicious purposes. If readers would like to use the information for personal gain, the author and publisher are not responsible for any harm or damage caused.This article was created for those readers who know that hacking activity (in the usual negative sense of the word) is illegal and entails a number of negative consequences both for the hacker himself and for society as a whole. For comparison, let's imagine an apartment burglar - he acts illegally, committing and sometimes stealing it. In this sense, a hacker is no different from this type of person: both are found, tried and imprisoned.
Therefore, the first rule in mastering this business is: before becoming a hacker, read the legislation and think about responsibility.
The hacking case became popular almost immediately after. Today you can often hear: “I want to become a hacker, a cracker,” and questions about how to break a site filled the Internet, even taking into account the fact that recently there have been a lot of examples of show trials in the case about information pests of the network space.
Definition
Before you become a hacker, you need to understand what it is. There are several myths in society regarding this computer craft, and all of them are only partially true.
Firstly, it is believed that a hacker is a programmer who is very knowledgeable in this field and hacks programs, databases, security systems, etc. Part of this statement is true, namely that these people are highly qualified. The rest is not true: initially, program hackers used workarounds, solving a lot of complex problems. Those who crack programs for destructive purposes are called "crackers" and are not particularly respected among programmers.
The word “hacker” itself is sometimes used when talking about a first-class specialist who knows the slightest subtleties of his craft and knows how to solve professional problems in an unconventional way.
But now, most people understand hackers as attackers who steal information that is not intended for publication or falling into the wrong hands (for example, passwords, secret government documents, personal user information, etc.).
Also, the understanding of hacking in society is so blurred that those who create and distribute viruses and illegally gain access to money accounts are also included in their ranks.
We can say that a large group of people consider them to be pests.
We will adhere to the concept of a hacker as a capable and intelligent programmer whose activities are not aimed at destruction and theft.
How to become a hacker: creativity
To be a hacker, you need to become a creative person, because the basis of this activity is finding atypical solutions.
The peculiarity of hacker activity is diversity, so it is necessary to solve new problems that require a non-standard approach. This is how skill develops, which is the main sign of a hacker.
knowledge and languages
To become one, you need to have a high level of intelligence, specific knowledge and practice.
The most important thing is to learn to program. To do this, choose a language, study it and practice it. For a true master, it is not enough to know one language perfectly, so you need to understand the very principle, the method of any language in order to be able to learn any other in a couple of days, correlating some differences with those already known.
How to become a hacker: practice
Books and lessons can only give a general theoretical idea of this matter, so if you have no desire to teach languages, but want real practice, then the most effective method is to read other people's codes and write your own.
How to become a hacker? What is needed for this? Where are the instructions? You won't find that in this article. Absurd? No, this article simply does not fit the entire amount of knowledge that you need to know. The material will be devoted to more vital and important aspects, about which there is not a word in beautiful films and glossy magazines. So if you are expecting something like “click here, hop and everything is hacked,” then this article is not for you, and probably not hacking either.
First, I would like to draw your attention to articles 272, 273 and 274, which are required reading, as they are fundamental in this path.
The next point is that hackers are not the only ones who hack and commit crimes. Many hackers are engaged in completely legal activities. Security audit, stability testing, consulting on the creation and design of applications, creating your own tools to improve the level of security, etc. So hackers are not only “bad and hairy men and women.”
Note: To be able to defend yourself with a sword from another sword, you need to be able to use that sword.
How to become a hacker - closer to reality
If you are really interested in the question of how to become a hacker, then you should be closer to reality. This means that the idea of “bang, everything is blinking, three commands, wow, wow, the mouse is clicked and access is gained” can correspond to reality only after a huge amount of time in preparing all this. But, let's start in order.
Basic myths about hackers:
1. These are cool guys with cool outfits. In principle, this can happen, but in most cases everything is somewhat different. The need to spend a lot of time at the computer leaves its mark. No offense to hackers, but have you seen how avid online gamers dress? Comfortable and comfortable clothes, not “latest fashion textiles”. In addition, lack of physical activity also affects.
2. Super puzzles with mega music. In films, characters draw cool diagrams, run through corridors, and generally do anything to depict painful activity. And all this is accompanied by cool, intriguing musical accompaniment. In reality, most of a hacker's work consists of routine tasks. Digging into source codes, including hexadecimal codes of libraries, tracking function calls, placing data in RAM, etc. All this, of course, can be done to cool music, but this has nothing to do with those effects from films.
3. Cool gadgets with super technology. Of course, hacking is largely related to mathematics, and where mathematics can come in handy, large productive capacities can be useful. But, in reality, this has nothing to do with bells and whistles and cool “dangles”. It's like street racing. Car body kits can only make things worse. Well, the car won’t go faster if you attach a noisy silencer, especially since it can generally cause the car’s power to be lost, since the flow of exhaust gases can form a barrier, which will cause the engine load to increase (higher load - less power ).
4. Three lines of code or five minutes to crack. If a mega system can be hacked in five minutes with a couple of lines of code, then such a system can be safely thrown away. We are not talking about situations with stupid errors that were discovered by chance or after a year of research. Of course, there are typical errors (SQL injections, buffer overflow, etc.), but even checking them takes a lot of time. So such a hack is only possible in cases where either the system has already been analyzed inside and out, or when it uses known or similar mechanisms. Remember that the hacker must still have all the necessary tools with him.
5. They can hack anything and under any conditions. Due to circumstances, hackers need to know a lot and this is normal. However, this does not change reality. There are many technical aspects, various restrictions and other things. In other words, the apples fell and continue to fall. An example from history is the Enigma cipher machine. Invented in 1917 (a patent was issued), and how many problems it caused during the Second World War. Over time, hacking it became possible, but this is over time and this takes into account the appearance of additional funds. In 1917 it was impossible to hack it.
And so on. The point is, you probably got the idea that the reality of a hacker is far from what is shown in movies or described in blog posts.
As I already said, there will be no standard instructions, but if you are really interested in learning, here are a few things that make sense to start studying.
Required basic knowledge of hackers:
1. Knowledge of machine codes, including hardware.
2. Knowledge about the structure of the operating system.
3. Knowledge of the network structure, technologies used, etc.
4. Knowledge in the field of cryptography. Ciphers, strength, methods of cracking and analysis.
5. Installation of anti-virus and other security measures. Technologies used.
6. The main hacking methods and technologies used. Vulnerabilities and the like.
7. And everything else that in one way or another may be connected with the object being hacked.
Moreover, all this is quite detailed, since in order to hack something, you need to thoroughly understand how it works. Those. not of the “operating system provides to users” type, but something of the “how signals are transmitted to the kernel, how memory is allocated, in which registers data is stored, what are collisions, etc.”
Now, you know about a number of significant aspects of the question of how to become a hacker, and you are also a little more familiar with the world of hacking.
The work of hackers is shrouded in romance. Hacking of Pentagon websites with the disclosure of secret documents, elegant theft of large sums of money from a bank, the ability to penetrate any door and find out any secret... Their possibilities are almost limitless, and their names are carefully hidden. The opportunity to join “the clan of the elite” attracts many people, especially teenagers, who have little idea of the responsibility for hacking someone else’s website, stealing and disclosing information. Let's just say that the Criminal Code provides for a whole list of articles for hackers.
However, it is not always possible to put an equal sign between the words “hacker” and “illegal activity”. If you have firmly decided that you want to become a hacker, then your services may be in great demand. A hacker is essentially an IT specialist of the highest level. And all banks and large companies that use computer technology to protect data dream of hiring such highly qualified specialists. A good hacker tests such protection for “gaps.” Any weakness in a security program can result in serious financial losses for a bank or corporation, so a person who knows how to find “gaps” in advance is very well rewarded for his services.
What does it take to become a hacker?
To the question “how to become a novice hacker?” There is only one answer: engage in self-development. The basic skills of a hacker are:
- Excellent knowledge of the Internet, but not at the level of a confident user. Understand on your own the interaction between the server and the browser, study the basic concepts, find out the meaning of the headers that are sent to the server by the client, etc. All information can be found on the Internet.
- Knowledge of basic programming languages. If you want to know how to become a professional hacker, then you can't do it without excellent programming skills. You can learn to write programs at a basic level yourself by studying numerous manuals. It is enough to be patient and spend at least a few days doing this activity to gain programming skills that you will improve later.
- A person who is looking for a way to become a hacker from scratch must learn hypertext markup language (HTML combined with CSS).
- Knowledge of English. How can you become a good hacker without knowing the language generally accepted on the Internet, used on all the world's services? No way.
Having mastered the basic skills that give you an idea of how to become a hacker from scratch, you can move on to “professional” issues. Today there is a lot of information on the Internet about how you can attack ICQ, the nuances of XSS attack technology are revealed, etc.
Hacker Code
If you are looking for a way to quickly become a professional hacker, then your allies in this matter are time and perseverance. You will have to master a lot of information, and you will not gain experience in just one week. Don't waste your time on computer games, but gain knowledge that will help you become a professional faster.
Yes, and one more thing: familiarize yourself with the Criminal Code in advance.