Studying has been crazy but I have pick back up an older project of mine, ready through to find out more!
I managed to get through a module a day these being, Denial-of-Service, Session Hijacking, Evading IDS, Firewalls, and Honeypots, Hacking Web Servers, Hacking Web Applications, SQL Injection, and Hacking Wireless Networks.
With only 4 modules remaining I will start by the end of the week diving fully in depth into each module before I sit the initial exam. I will also provide a study tool for each of the modules, I currently am planning mnemonics, mind maps and flash cards.
This week my favorite module so far is definitely Denial-of-Service, I find it really interesting how zombie devices work within a C&C/ DDoS attack.
Denial-of-Service:
What I learned: Due to the passively vulnerable nature of android devices I learnt that they can/ are often used as botnets for launching DDoS attacks.
What I found interesting: I quite liked learning about all off the different types and tools used for DoS attack I especially found SlowLoris DDoS attack interesting as I enjoy learning about DHCP attacks.
What I will need to come back to: I will have to come back to the labs to get a good feel for using these tools and be able to fully understand how they all work and how to prevent them.
Session Hijacking:
What I learned: I learned the difference between spoofing and hijacking, that being spoofing pretends to be another user and hijacking is seizing control of a active session.
What I found interesting: I really like how UDP hijacking occurs as it involves sniffing and then sending a forged reply to the target before the server can send the valid reply.
What I will need to come back to: I will have to try and fully understand and wrap my head around each of the attack methods and how they vary from each other.
Evading IDS, Firewalls, and Honeypots:
What I learned: There are alot more types of IDS and firewall evasion techniques than I originally though, with 18 ways for IDS and 16 ways for firewalls.
What I found interesting: I really like fragmentation attacks as using them to bypass a IDS as it requires sending packets that are designed to loose a good chunk of info when crossing into its destination.
What I will need to come back to: The basics of this module were quick to cover but to be able to fully understand it I need to go more in depth with the methods and detection techniques.
Hacking Web Servers:
What I learned: Hacking web servers require alot of information gathering to be able to find ways in and out of a system and the importance as a developer to hide debugging information
What I found interesting: Are Verbose error messages and how critical it is to ensure the quality of the developers code to ensure they have left nothing that a malicious actor can use against the company.
What I will need to come back to: I will have to come back and learn more in depth how to use information from a web server such as verbose messages or robots.txt files to maliciously gain access to a server.
Hacking Web Applications:
What I learned: That their are numerous ways to prevent/ defend against web application attacks and how lot lead back to the developer/s with how the servers and applications are coded.
What I found interesting: Cookie/ session poisoning is quite interesting as it can escalate access and/or assume the identity of another user without having to login.
What I will need to come back to: Actively participating in my labs to be able to confidently perform these attacks as well as trying to better remember OWASP Top 10.
SQL Injection:
What I learned: I learned how to perform blind, Error based, and Union based SQL injection attacks and how to prevent them.
What I found interesting: I really enjoyed doing blind SQL injection attacks as I am intrigued about using timeouts to figure out credentials as well as learning the alphabet in ascii code.
What I will need to come back to: I will need to take some more notes and try to remember the commands for tools such as MSSQL and Owasp Zap.
Hacking Wireless Networks:
What I learned: How to properly sniff Wi-Fi packets using Wireshark and the reason why hiding your SSID can make you look like a bigger target.
What I found interesting: Evil Twins. My favorite form of deception and hacking, they are funnily enough what got me interested in hacking and definitely made it easy to learn how to actually make them.
What I will need to come back to: I will need to be able to perform Wireshark sniffing and to be able to efficiently search for data.
Fina1lly at the end of my week 2 recap. This certification is quite content heavy but alot of it is enjoyable making it easy to study for longer durations of time and making it easier to absorb all of the information.
If you have any questions or any feedback feel free to comment or leave a message on the homepage as that will send directly to me!
Thanks for reading!
