Welcome to the industry
Firstly,This roadmap will guide you into what you will learn about ETHICAL HACKING as a career and ways to set yourself up for the tasks. I will also show you why hard work is really needed in becoming a great hacker, avoid been a script kiddie(tho everyone was once such), setup a hacking lab, run VMs in your OS machine and use your skills for greater honour for your name and the industry at large.
HACKER'S ROADMAP:
➤Learn Hacking Manifesto: Firstly,Understand that hacking is a big game, we believe in freedom and mutual responsibly and been a great one, you have to be outstanding having the attitude to be curious and creative makes you a better one. Hackers take a special delight in solving problems, sharpening their skills and exercising their intelligence.Thus its requires hard work(Key to success), if even you tend to be a malicious one bring the world to a pause, you are destined to read endlessly and practice what you have learnt. So work when you get the chance because unlike other pros, cyber security evolves so fast as whatever you’re taught today maybe less useful tomorrow. From time to time, you’ve to put much effort into learning the latest strategies, technologies, new vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques discovered.
"THE WORLD IS FULL OF FASCINATING PROBLEMS WAITING TO BE SOLVED”
➤Learn to Program: This sounds essential as for every hacker, you need to be able to use different programming languages depending on what are their uses. Hackers are problem solver and tool builders, learning how to program will help you implement solutions to problems.
Writing programs as a hacker will you to automate many tasks which would usually take lots of time to complete.
Writing program can also help you identify and exploit programming errors in applications that you will be targeting. No need to reinvest the wheel all the time, there are numbers of open source programs that are readily usable. You can customize the already existing applications and add your methods to suit your needs.
"THE USEFULNESS OF THIS LANG DEPENDS ON YOUR SCENARIO"
➤Learn UNIX: While you cant be an ethical hacker without understanding UNIX. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly UNIX-centered. There are many types of UNIX-like operating systems, the most popular being Linux. Download any Linux distribution of your choice in the internet. For ethical hacking, I strongly recommend KALI LINUX and ParrotOS
"PICK A DISTRO"
➤RUN Virtual Machines(VMs): When you’re going to be doing penetration testing or hacking=related testing. It is necessary to build a lab because you cannot experiment on a live system. Therefore, you need a virtual environment known as “Virtual Machine”. For Beginners, I suggest sticking to VirtualBox or VMware . They are both simple to install and run.
Maybe be wondering why you need virtual machine? YES, you do need it and for several reason-the important reason is you need to stay within laws. You must practice your hacking-related skills in a legal way. Therefore you should run all your test virtually, In an artificial-built in system without compromising or attacking your main system. Secondly it protects you from malicious attacks to the main system, you can browse the web safely without thinking to harm your system.
Remember “There is possibility that during testing with a tool you could break the virtual operating system and not your live system”. Thus knowing the weakness of these OS and targeting them systematically helps.
"RUN MULTIPLE VMs IF YOU WISH"
➤Learn Networking Fundamentals: A wide knowledge of networking is important for learning to perform ethical hacking. Data travels through many layers. Once an ethical hacker understands how there layers woks, they can understand the movement of data and therefore track and block data or retrieve data. So network security is extremely important to ethical hackers.
.TCP/IP and UDP Protocols, EMI to exploit the vulnerability of the www
.Subnet,LAN,WAN and VPN.
.Networking commands to do an HTTP request needs to be on your fingertips.
"THIS IS ESSENTIAL IN ANY CYBERSECURITY FIELD"
➤Learn Cryptography: This is the practice and study of techniques that are used for secure communication in the presence of third parties. Cryptography is heavily used in SSL based internet communication. This is one of the most essentials in all because it enables hackers to crack hashes, cipher text and secured algorithms
.Understand how SSL works and its cryptography in keeping SSL secure
This determines algorithms are used for cryptography key generation, digital signing, verification to protect data privacy, web browsing on the internet and confidential communications such as credit card transactions and email.
"TO TRANSFORM MESSAGES IN WAYS THAT ARE HARD TO DECIPHER" .
Read About: -
"ENCRYPTION ALGORITHMS AND WHY THEY ARE DIFFICULT TO DECRYPT".
Its is important to understand what these theoretical vulnerabilities and defenses look like in real-world applications. So, you should practice hacking and defending.
➤Participate in open-source Projects,CTF(Capture The Flag) Platforms. Bug bounties also a great way to practice.
HackerOne and Bugcrowd are two of the biggest platforms, with a wide variety of clients.
➤Contribute your vulnerability findings to global vulnerability database.
➤Pick a program related to your chosen field of expertise and hack away! actual targets instead of stimulated ones like CTFs. so it will be a lot harder, but a lot more realistic.
➤Promote Valuable Information: Another characteristic of a good hacker is that he must be able to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents, such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) lists, and make those available to all. Those who maintain technical FAQs are respected at the same level as the open-source authors.
➤Helps in keeping the Organization Working Popular hacking culture is run by Volunteers who do some very important but unglamorous tasks, such as administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, developing RFCs, and other technical standards. Doers of these jobs earns a lot of respect as these are huge time consumer and is not as much fun as playing with codes.
LASTLY FOR NOW:
EXPERIMENT! EXPERIMENT!! EXPERIMENT!! .Document The Progress .Consider a backup before any experiments .Start small and have check-pt I guess this article has made an impart to you?Alright HAPPY HACKING!