Many people believe that hacking is a simple process. Someone hands you a silver bullet and you own the system! That is far from the truth. Hacking is a slow, methodical and sometimes tedious process. You have to do your "homework" to be successful.
The hacking process generally is depicted as a multi-step process. Here is how I see it.
- Passive Reconnaissance
- Active Reconnaissance
- Footprinting and Enumeration
- Exploitation
- Escalating Privileges
- Cover your Tracks
Most want to focus on Step 4, but you have to do Steps 1-3, if you expect to have any success in Step 4. You must then do Step 5 to escalate your privileges to "root" or "sysadmin" that would give you unlimited access and power over the system. Finally, you need to do Step 6, if you don't want to get caught.
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The information here might not seem like much, but he is right. Blindly throwing exploitations out is more likely going to alert the sysadmin to your presence than get you into the system. Even if you access the system, the admins will be on high alert looking for signs of suspect behavior. Ultimately as in war, the more surprise you have when you finally own the box, the more time you have to cover your tracks and keep the box. Ideally, if you can gather all you need to identify a system's components without ever throwing a nasty packet their way, then you are guaranteed to catch the admin with his proverbial pants down.
I always viewed it as playing with Lego's really. You are building up from nothing to something marvelous and that marvel is power.
so true when i started to teach my self how to hack i thought exactly this !. i thought i could just violate some one who hacked my girl friend and tried to ruin her pay pal requesting money, i trawled the net for viruses to send to his email as he never followed step 6 ;). but then i realized theirs a lot more to the art form. i love waking up every day and learning something new as one day his arse will be mine !!!. and thank you occupy the web for the lessons you teach!
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