Chapter 2 : Hacking Environment ( Part 1 ) - Beginning Ethical Hacking With Python

 Hacking Environment ( Chapter - 2 ) - Beginning Ethical Hacking With Python by Cyber Anthology

            The very first thing that you need is a virtual machine . As I said before, I have

Ubuntu as my default operating system and inside my virtual machine I have

installed two operating systems—one is Windows 10 and the other is Kali

Linux.

    Technically, from now on I would mention Windows 10 and Kali Linux as

my virtual machines. Kali Linux is a Linux distribution that comes up with

many useful hacking tools. So I strongly suggest using it as your virtual

machine. You may also read the documentation page of Kali Linux, which will

also be an immense help.

    At the same time, I’d not suggest using Windows of any kind for the ethical

hacking purpose. Some may argue that few hacking tools can be used in

Windows, so why you are suggesting otherwise? The point is: in the ethical

hacking world, you need to be anonymous all the time. You won’t want to keep

your trail, anyway, so that you can be traced back. Remaining anonymous is a

big challenge. In Linux it is fairly easy and you can stay anonymous for the

time being.

Why should I use Linux?

    Keeping that in mind, I explain that technique of being anonymous in great

detail so that before jumping up into the big task, you make your defense much

stronger. Being anonymous is the most important thing in the world of ethical

hacking. Keeping yourself anonymous in Windows is not possible. So it is

better to adapt to the Linux environment first. Another important thing is, most

of the great hacking tools are not available in the Windows environment.

    If you have never heard of any Linux distribution , don’t worry. You can

either install user-friendly Ubuntu inside your Windows system or you can

easily partition your disk into two parts and install Ubuntu and Windows

separately as your two default operating systems. It is preferable to do the

latter. Installing and uninstalling parallel operating systems always teaches you

something new. If you are familiar with Windows, I won’t tell you to simply

dump it for the sake of learning ethical hacking. You can keep it and use it for

your daily work. There is no problem in doing this.

    In the Internet world, Linux is used more. So you need to learn a few Linux

commands. Software installation in Linux is slightly different from Windows

environments. There are Linux distributions like Fedora or Debian, and many

more. I named Ubuntu just because it is extremely popular and Windows users

find themselves comfortable inside it. The operations are more or less the

same, including the software installations. For beginners, it is not a good idea

to install Kali Linux as your default OS. You must read Kali documentation,

where it is clearly stated that Kali is more for developers. You are going to

install it inside your Virtual Box. Kali Linux is a kind of Linux distribution that

comes with lot of hacking tools. You need to know them and use them in the

course of ethical hacking.

Learn a Programming Language:

    Installing Virtual Machine is a very important step as the first step of

building your environment. In the next chapter I will show you how you can do

that for different operating systems. Another important thing is learning a

programming language that will really help you learn ethical hacking better.

The obvious choice is Python . At the time of writing this, Python 3.x

has already arrived and is considered the future of this language. It is very

quickly catching up with the old Python 2.x version, which has been around the

market for a while. The official Python download page provides the repository

of Python installers for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. If

you download an installer, it is of immense help because it comes with the

Python interpreter, standard library, and standard modules. 

Why Python?

    The standard library and built-in modules are specifically very important because they offer

you several useful capabilities that will help you achieve your goal as an

ethical hacker. Among the useful modules, you will get cryptographic services,

Internet data handling, interaction with IP protocols, interoperability with the

operating system, and many more. So go ahead, pick up any good beginner’s

book on Python , read the official documentation and know that it is a part of

your learning schedule. Python is an extremely easy language to learn.

To create an ideal ethical hacker’s environment, a few steps are extremely

important. The steps include: installing Virtual Machine or Virtual Box (VB) ,

having a basic knowledge about networking, and learning a useful

programming language like Python. Click here for  Python Official Site and  Download Python Documentation.

Let us first have a look at the basic networking knowledge. 

    In the next part of this chapter, we will very briefly see how internetworking models work.

We will look into the different types of networking models. We will also learn

about the devices that comprise a network.

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REF Book: Beginning Ethical Hacking With Python

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this chapter (doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-2541-7_1)

contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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