2: What is Programming, What is Hacking & Why Learn Them (Preview)

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What is Programming, What is Hacking & Why Learn Them (Preview)

Now, as I promised you, this course is going to be highly practical, but I also promised that I will not neglect the theory. So I want to cover some terminology before we jump into hacking on programming. Now what we mean by hacking is being able to gain access to a system that you’re not supposed to have access to. So for example, logging into an email account that you’re not supposed to have access to is considered hacking that account. Getting it access to a remote computer that you’re not supposed to have access to is how can that computer, reading information that you’re not supposed to be able to read again is considered hacking. So you can see that there is a large number of ways to hack into a system and the word hacking can refer to a number of things, but the main concept is the same.

Gaining access or being able to do things that you’re not supposed to be able to do is considered hacking. Now there are three main types of hackers. We have the black hat hackers. These are the bad people that hack systems illegally in order to steal money or to achieve their own illegal goals. The second part of hackers are the white hat hackers. So this is us. These people use the same techniques used by the black hat hackers and they also hack into systems, but they are only hacking to systems that they have permission to hack in order to test the security of the systems. And finally we have the grey hat hackers. These are a mixture of the two. So they’ll hack into any system even if they don’t have permission to test the security of the system. But they will never steal money or damage that system.

And in most cases they’ll go ahead and tell the administrator of that system. But what they do is still in legal because they test the security of systems that they do not own or do not have permission to test. Now, one big question that people always ask is why hacking? Why teach or learn hacking? Well, hacking is an existing industry. There are lots of job opportunities for ethical hackers. For people like us who would go ahead and test the security of systems to make sure that these systems are secure and not vulnerable to black hat hackers. There is actually a huge demand for ethical hackers these days because of the increased amount of hacking attacks. So we hear on the daily big systems and big companies are getting hacked. Not so long ago, Uber got hacked and information of more than 56 million users were exposed. So companies like Uber, Facebook, and Google, they hire hackers in order to try and hack into their systems and tell them where the weaknesses are so that they can fix it.

They also have bug bounty programs where they literally ask all the hackers around the world to go ahead and try to hack into their websites and with their web applications. And if they could, they will pay them a bounty for the bugs that they find now, thus the hacking part covered. But this course is not only a hacking course, we will also cover programming. So what do we mean by programming? Well, programming is the process of writing a program. And this vague definition lead us to the next question. What is a program? Well, our program is a set of instructions that will allow us to solve a problem. For example, we have the Facebook APP or the Facebook website and the problem that it solves is social networking. So it allows us to stay connected with our friends and family. And other example is your media player such as iTunes.

It’s solves the problem of playing music for you. So if you think of it, any program that you use solves a certain problem. So programming is the process of writing a program to solve a problem. Now since this is a hacking and programming course, our problem is always going to be trying to hack into a certain system. So basically we will be writing programs that will allow us to hack into networks, computers, websites, and so on. Now the solution for the problem cannot be written in plain English. You’re going to have to write it in a language that the computer can understand. So you’re going to have to use a programming language to do that. Now you can use any programming language to write programs for hacking, but in this course we’re only going to be using python. The reason why I picked python, because it’s a very simple language, yet powerful.

It’s open source and object oriented and it has great libraries that can be used for both for hacking and for writing. Very useful normal programs other than hacking programs. Now the last question that you might think we covered, why you’d want to learn hacking, but why would you want to learn programming? Well, programming is a very, very important skill these days. Everything around us is controlled by computers and the only way to communicate with computers is to write programs. Some countries are even starting to teach programming to their school children because they think it is just as important as learning in maths and other subjects. Now, since you want to be a hacker or you’re interested in hacking, then programming is very, very important for you, especially because it’ll allow you to start implementing your own attacks. So instead of using other tools made by other people, you’re going to be able to write your own tools to exploit weaknesses that you discover or to carry out attacks that nobody has ever implemented. Not only that, what you’re going to have the ability to read programs written by other people and extend them, fix them if they have bogs or extend them to make them fit your situation or your scenario.