1. 20-minute Intro to Hacking
Mike Gagnon, Ethical Hacker

2. First things first…

3. Guideline: Never hack someone’s system without their permission
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

4. 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)

5. How to hack?
Hacking = manipulating a system to do something it wasn’t designed to do
Like hot wiring a car
Hacking computers is often simple (once you know how computers work)

6. Just like requesting a person to compute something for you
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
google.com computes the response
this response
is a web page:
request
Just like requesting a person to compute something for you

7. 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.

8. Hack my server!
You have my permission to try to crash:
But I won’t tell you how
It’s a puzzle

9. Guideline: Never hack someone’s system without their permission
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

10. 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