Become an ethical hacker in simple steps: A guide for beginners

September 23, 2019, 16:41

Are you tired of reading endless news about ethical hacking and not really knowing what it means? It's time to become an ethical hacker!

This post is for people who:

They have no experience with Cybersecurity (Hacking)
They have limited experience
They just want to stay informed about ethical hacking

Import

First of all, let’s agree that “a career in Cybersecurity” is like “a career in banking”, i.e. it is an umbrella term that incorporates dozens of different directions within the industry. In Cybersecurity we can, for example, talk about digital forensics or malware/software detecting, auditing, pentesting, social engineering and many more. Each of these subcategories within cybersecurity deserves a separate analysis, but, for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on some important general requirements that everyone needs before starting a successful career in IT Security.

If you don’t have experience, don’t worry. We all had to start somewhere and we all needed help to get to where we are today. No one is born with all the necessary skills. So, you have zero experience and limited skills… our advice in this case is to learn some basics.

What is hacking?

Hacking identifies the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a system and provides access to it .

The hacker gains unauthorized access to the target system, while the ethical hacker has official permission to legally breach a system for security reasons.

Therefore, to distinguish them, there are different names for different types of hackers.

White hat — ethical hacker

Black hat — classic hacker, gains unauthorized access

Grey hat — a person who gains unauthorized access but reveals weaknesses in the target company

Script kiddie — a person with no technical skills who uses pre-built tools

Hacktivist — a person who hacks for a purpose and wants to get certain messages across. For example, a copyright strike.

In fact, one goal of ethical hacking is to uncover system weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a company in order to fix them. The ethical hacker records everything he or she has done.

Skills required to become an ethical hacker

First of all to become a Pentester you must be willing to constantly learn new things. Secondly, you must have a strong fundamental understanding of at least one coding/scripting language as well as an understanding of Network and Web Security.

A few steps if you want to get started now..

Learn coding.
Understand the basic concepts of the operating system
Basic networking and security principles
Read about as many technologies as you can

What platforms do you code on?

This depends on the platform you will be working on. For web applications, we recommend learning HTML, PHP, JSP, and ASP. For mobile applications, try Java (Android), Swift (iOS), C# (Windows Phone). For desktop-based software, try Java, C#, C++.

We would like to recommend Python as well because it is a general-purpose language and increasingly popular these days due to its portability.

But what is really essential for any programming language is to learn the basics of programming, concepts like data types, variable manipulation throughout the program at the OS using subroutines known as functions, and so on. If you learn these, it is pretty much the same for any programming language except for a few syntactic changes.

ProTips

To be an expert in any programming language, understand OS level operations of that language (varies in different compilers) or learn assembly language to become more generalized
Don't get discouraged if you can't achieve results in a short time. The "Miyagi" learning style is preferable. So, motivate yourself for what comes next.
Never underestimate the power of network and system administrators. They can make you their *hypothetical* slaves in a corporate infosec environment.