A Basic Guide to Hacking – Intro

I will be starting a series of tutorials on hacking, starting with the basics. These tutorials will use Ubuntu Linux and GCC, though you shouldn’t have too much trouble just using GCC on Windows. You will also use GDB, but I believe this comes packaged with GCC (maybe not, sorry).

If you really like these tutorials, I would suggest buying the book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, which is where I learned these techniques. I may be able to upload an ISO of Ubuntu with the GCC tools installed later, but for now I suggest downloading Ubuntu 7.04 and installing GCC and GDB yourself. If you don’t want to, you should be able to find a way to do this all in Windows, I’m just using Linux because I learned in Linux, and Linux is free, so everyone has access to it.

What you will need for this guide is:

A computer with access to GCC for compiling C and debugging it to look at the ASM.

Free time

Recommendations:

Ubuntu Linux with GCC and GDB installed

An x86 type of processor (this is pretty generic for most home computers, though some have a 64-bit instead)

Some prior knowledge of C or ASM (thought I will start with the basics)

So without further ado, I will begin with the intro to what you will learn.

Many people see “hackers” as bad people that want to steal your identity or break your computer. Maybe they wanna give you viruses then make you pay to remove them, but the truth is those people are only a small group of the hackers. Hackers are people that find ways around problems to get things done in the most efficient way they can. Hackers will look deep down in to the source code of a program and say to themselves, hey, that guy put < 10 when it should’ve been <= 10… how can I use that to my advantage? But a hacker doesn’t use this knowledge for evil, a good hacker will take that error and make an exploit to maybe add an extra capability to a program that wasn’t there before, or something of the sort. The methods I will teach you will be the basics to get you started, what you do with them is your decision. Maybe you’ll decide to hack the U.S. government because you’ll notice that one of their web servers is running IIS and you can hack into it, or maybe you’ll hack someone’s games to tell them how to fix it. Or maybe you’ll hack Windows Live Messenger to remove the ads from the main window, or to find a way to make it so when you start a conversation, more money is donated to charity than normally.

Whatever you do with this information, just make sure to have fun with it.

I’ll try to post the first guide in the next few days. It will include the very basics of C programming, along with some very very basic ASM debugging to show you what you’re getting into. It may look complicated at first, but you should be able to get the hang of it rather quickly.

Have fun ^_^