How To Become an Ethical Hacker – Beginners Guide

How To Become an Ethical Hacker – Beginners Guide. I’m sure you read stories about ethical hacking, but not knowing what that means?

Our article will cover  few points for people with no experience in cybersecurity or have limited experience.

We receive many emails asking on how to become ethical hacker. Some of more frequent questions “where should I start?”. We will try to answer these questions and give you a more technical details on how to start a career in cybersecurity as a beginner and how to gain more expertise in the domain.

Remember if your goal is to learn hacking for the reason of hacking into your friend’s Facebook account or email, it will not work for you. But if you decided to learn hacking because of your passion for technology and willingness to be an expert in computer systems, things should workout for you!

Career in cybersecurity is more like saying career in Banking. There will be so many niches within the industry from auditing, pentesting, social engineering, digital foresnics, malware / software detecting, etc. You many choose any of the above, however in this article we will cover generic skills that you need before starting your career.

If your background doesn’t bring any experience to the table, don’t worry, we all been there. Nobody has all the necessary skill from beginning. So our advice in your case is to learn absolute fundamentals.

• What is hacking?

Hacking is determining weakness and vulnerabilities of systems and attain access to it.

Ethical hacker have an official and legitimate permission to do a security assessment of a system, but hacker is doing this unauthorized.

Here are some type of hackers for your intro:

Hacktivist – those who hack due to some ideas and to make a statement.

Script kiddie –  they usually use pre-build tools and have no technical skills.

Grey hat  – they reveal the weakens to the company after they get unauthorized access.

Black hat – get unauthorized access

White hat – ethical hacker, they document everything they do and reveal the weaknesses & vulnerabilities to the company.

• What skills required for ethical hacker

– Programming skills

– Fundamentals of Networking

– Operating System

– Get to know as many technology as you can put your hands on

• What to code in ?

To answer this question, one have to consider on what platform you will be working on.

– Web applications: PHP, ASP , JPS

– Mobile apps : Swift/Objective-C, Java( Android) ,

– Software [desktop] : C#, C++, Objective-C

It is necessary to learn the fundamentals of programming, like data types, the variable manipulation at the OS level to the use of functions, etc. Here are some tips to take in consideration:

1. Try to understand the OS level operations on the language you are learning or alternatively learn the assembly language.
2. Keep your self motivated in your learning path and remember to achieve results takes time.

• Here are resources that will help to learn from scratch

1. Breaking into Information Security: Learning the Ropes 101
2. Web Hacking 101