Hacking by Solis Tech: How to Hack Computers, Basic Security and Penetration Testing (2014)

Chapter 5: Where Hackers Attack

At this point, you may have listed down all the privacy policies, unsecured hosts and their functions, and all the applications that you have in your computer in order to find out from which direction would an attack against you would probably come from. If you have not done so yet, it’s okay. Just make sure that you have made it a point to run antimalware or anti-spybot programs in your computer to learn if it contains any program that may be spying on your activities.

When you take the step to assess the vulnerabilities of your network and your computer, you will definitely want to learn the favorite places to attack from hackers themselves. You can actually search hacker boards online to have an idea about their favorite methods of attacking, or you can make use of the following databases that show where computers are typically most vulnerable:

1. NIST National Vulnerability Database

2. US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database

3. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

By learning common vulnerabilities, you will be more aware about the most classified vulnerabilities that are repeatedly being exploited by malicious hackers. That would give you a good jumpstart into knowing what area of your network or computer you should be testing for weakness first.

If you do not want to look at the most common computer vulnerabilities and jump right into testing your own system, here are the options that you have:

1. Automated testing – This is ideal for those who want quick reports on vulnerabilities as often as they want.

2. Manual testing – This would entail manually connecting to ports, and would be a great time to learn which ports are vulnerable. You will get results that are listed in the databases mentioned above, but that would give you an idea about how these vulnerabilities are discovered.

Tools you can Use

There are several ethical hacking tools that are available online that will help you discover vulnerabilities in your system. Most of the tools that you will find would allow you to exploit specific types of vulnerabilities, so they may not show you all the weak points in your system. However, you may want to use them if you have managed to seek all the possible weak points and would want to zero in on specific vulnerabilities for testing.

A great tool that you can purchase for scanning vulnerabilities would be the QualysGuard Suite. It serves as both a port scanner and a vulnerability scanning tool. It runs in a browser, which means that you would not need a second computer to run its tools for scanning – just type in your IP address and it will promptly do the scan. You can also install another software from the same manufacturer that would allow you to scan internal systems. Once you are done, you can choose to validate the results.

Penetrating

Once you have discovered security flaws in your computer system, you can easily do the following hacks:

1. Access other systems that are still connected to yours

2. Capture screenshots

3. Find sensitive files and access them

4. Send an email as the administrator

5. Start or stop applications or services

6. Get access to a remote command prompt

7. Gain more information about different hosts and the data they contain

8. Upload a file remotely

9. Launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack

10. Perform SQL injection attack

You can use software known as Metasploit in order to demonstrate how you can do all these by achieving a complete system penetration. By doing so, you can see how far a malicious hacker can go once he is able to know all the vulnerabilities of your computer.